


Evolution

by Roscuro



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, But wow, Eevees are so popular, Family, Gen, I did not know Eevees were so popular when I started this, Original Character(s), RBY Game World, Team Rocket - Freeform, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2018-01-01
Packaged: 2018-02-21 21:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 56,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2482946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Roscuro/pseuds/Roscuro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It was during one of these interludes in which Kindle was out of sight, and dawn was beginning to brush the hazy horizon, that one of the reasons Scarlet City residents were so incredibly bitter became clear.  People often went inexplicably missing when out alone.  No remains were ever found, which ruled out Pokémon attacks, but no other explanation was ever offered.  The people simply vanished like mirages, and were never seen again.</i>
</p><p>
  <i>It was awfully easy for a small group of elite Team Rocket scientists to hide in a large place like Scarlet City.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. White Ink

“This is a story that usually I write in white ink, but most people miss it & start to read too much into it & think it says something about life they couldn't figure out themselves. So, now I write only with stuff people can read & say things as clearly as I can. Like this: don't believe anyone who writes with white ink on white paper. They have too much to hide.”

* * *

Scarlet City was, ostensibly, a festering wound that no one cared enough about to bother healing, Enya decided as she hastily exited the Pokémon Center and breathed in the rank night air. Putrid trash was heaped up on every tangled street, and Grimer and foaming Raticate lurked around every corner. The atmosphere in Scarlet City was bitter and unpleasant, and the residents were even more so. During the day, the few sun rays that had forced themselves through the City’s persistent layer of toxic smog beat down on the foul-smelling garbage. Now at night, the moon wasn’t even visible; the girl could see a lone, mangy, and miserable Meowth crouched on the dented side of a fallen trash can, staring wistfully up into the hazy abyss.

Even Nurse Joy, whose siblings in every other town were almost too cheerful, had healed Enya’s Pokémon only grudgingly, and glowered the whole time the machinery did its work. This glare had stabbed the girl repeatedly in the back as she quickly scampered out of the Center. After making her escape, she halted on the broken and cracked asphalt and heaved a sigh of relief. The weeds that pushed through the splits in the concrete were the only greenery to be seen in the entire landscape, though landscape was perhaps not the most applicable term for a place where dingy, oppressive buildings pressed in on every side.

 _I miss the stars_ , Enya thought, peering into the murky sky like one of the moon-pining Meowth. _But_ – she glanced down at the five red and white balls on her belt – _my Pokémon have got to miss them more. We ought to get out of this place soon._ With that, she strode forward purposefully, turned the corner in front of the Pokémon Center – casually ignoring the obscene graffiti that was slathered on the brick walls – and found herself faced with five unremarkable alleys. All shadowy, all rather less than appetizing in smell, but none of which looked particularly familiar. And Enya had absolutely no idea which she had exited to get to the hospital.

“Freefalling hell,” the girl swore quietly. “This just keeps getting better.” After a few moments of contemplation, she stepped hesitantly towards the opening that was second to the left. Immediately, several red eyes within the alleyway opened and stared hungrily at her, light from broken streetlamps reflected unevenly within them. “Forget that,” Enya grumbled, taking an immediate step backwards. She reached into the neck of her loose-fitting dark green tunic and pulled out a short chain. Under the clasp, where a locket would normally have gone, hung a minimized Pokéball. It twirled at the end of the necklace until Enya yanked it off with a soft clicking sound.

“Kindle,” she called out, holding out the now enlarged ball in front of her and letting the chain drop. The ball cracked open to yield a Charizard engulfed in jagged red light that soon faded; the flame at the end of the Pokémon’s tail illuminated the bare street and ravaged brick walls. Minimizing the ball again, Enya attached it once more to her necklace and tucked it back underneath her collar. “Hey, sweetcheeks,” she said to Kindle, reaching up to rub his nose with a smile. He grunted a greeting in return and nuzzled her hard enough to make her stagger back a step. She smacked his elbow lightly in return.

Kindle had been Enya’s first Pokémon, obtained as a Charmander on her fourteenth birthday from Professor Oak. The Pokémon rarely did as she ordered until one day she thought to simply ask, at which point he was happy to obey. Upon this basis of equality, a close friendship quickly grew, unpredictable and fiery and wonderful. Two years later, Kindle had evolved twice, Enya had trained five other powerful Pokémon, and together they had beaten the Elite Four at the Indigo Plateau. Yet still the two best friends played off of each other fiercely, like two sparks.

“Are you feeling better now?” Enya asked with quiet worry, pushing her unruly brown hair out of her eyes. At midday, the Charizard had been hit with a powerful Toxic attack while battling in the middle of an unnamed forest; several Full Heals had had no effect on the status problem. It had taken the rest of the day and a significant portion of the night to even locate a Pokémon Center in Scarlet City which, when found, looked exceptionally questionable. Enya would be unsurprised if the Pokémon Center’s machines had not healed her Pokémon properly.

But Kindle smirked and gave his trainer a thumbs-up. Between sarcasm and hand gestures, he had long ago picked up everything he needed to communicate effectively with his trainer.

“I know, this wasn’t the choicest place to get you fixed up, but it was closest,” Enya defended herself. “Anyway, that’s why I called you out. We’re going to get out of this diseased pit ASAP. Only I’m lost ” – a snort, quickly stifled, from Kindle – “just a little bit, you ass, and this city is a freaking labyrinth. Would you mind flying above the streets I should take to hit the main road out of here? I’ll follow the light from your tail.”

Pointedly, Kindle shook out his wings and flapped them sharply, a long scar on one thrown into sharp relief by his tail’s flame. "No. I will not fly on your back," Enya growled, tensing. This argument again. "You don't know the move Fly, and I got in enough trouble from the Pokémon Field Move Union last time you gave me a ride. The fine’s not so bad, but do you want to be grounded for a month?" Zephyr, the only Pokémon on her team who did know Fly, was a hulking Aerodactyl and would never fit into the back alleys of Scarlet City.

The Charizard stuck his long tongue out at Enya and then gave in, turning to make a rude gesture at the eyes still glaring out from the alleyways, which rapidly disappeared. Kindle said something in the language of Pokémon loudly and clearly – something, Enya imagined, that was not entirely polite and nonthreatening – and there was an instantaneous ruckus of scuffling and banging from every alley. Once the noise settled down and the wild Pokémon had, Enya presumed, run off, she glanced at Kindle. The self-satisfied smirk on his face assured her that she had nothing to fear from the Pokémon of Scarlet City tonight.

“Thanks, dearest heart.” Enya shifted the heavy bag on her back and tightened the straps a bit. Kindle nodded and took off with one great beat of his wings. He took to the sky and quickly disappeared within the sickly haze of pollution. All that was visible was a soft corona of reddish light emitted by his tail, twisting and swirling in the air. This nimbus circled a few moments, and then struck out in one direction, above the alleyway in the middle.

“I knew that,” Enya muttered, heading after the sky-bound flame. “I knew this was the one.” The path was as unfamiliar to her as ever.

For a couple of hours, cursing Scarlet City's enormity the whole time, the girl followed the light, paying more attention to her Pokémon’s trail than her own and consequently tripping with painful regularity over garbage and debris. It was tribute to how terrifying Kindle could be when he wanted to that no wild Pokémon sought her out as easy prey, and Enya was grateful to him. But not too grateful, since every so often, the Charizard would briefly lose track of her and soar ahead, leaving her standing alone and lost in the stench until he realized his mistake and returned.

It was during one of these interludes in which Kindle was out of sight, and dawn was beginning to brush the hazy horizon, that one of the reasons Scarlet City residents were so incredibly bitter became clear. People often went inexplicably missing when out alone. No remains were ever found, which ruled out Pokémon attacks, but no other explanation was ever offered. The people simply vanished like mirages, and were never seen again.

It was awfully easy for a small group of elite Team Rocket scientists to hide in a large place like Scarlet City.

* * *

“Likely Target sighted, Green.”

“Copy, White. Describe current position and Target.”

“I am on the roof of the abandoned Potions factory on the corner of Greengage and Fairview. Target is brown, female, maybe five foot four, late teens. She has short brown hair, green shirt, blue jeans, a black jacket. A backpack. She's alone and staring at the sky. Really hard to miss her.”

“Do you have White’s position, Yellow?”

“Roger that, Green. Clear visual on the Target. Do you want us to take this one?”

“Affirmative. Let's go for the record tonight, boys. You come back with four in the bag, and I might give you tomorrow off.”

" _Excellent_. Yellow, you've got the stage."

"Deploying the tranquilizer now, White. Give it a few seconds…and…she's down. Move in."

"Approaching the Target now. Preparing the P-72 Morphic injection. Serum is prepared. Preparing to inject – damn! She’s not unconscious! She's not moving, but her eyes are open and are focusing on me. Yellow, shoot her again!”

“Negative. There was enough in that tranq to bring down a Tauros. Another could kill her.”

“Then she dies, Yellow! We cannot risk her remembering this later on; we’ve only done so well here because no one knows we’re around.”

“But –”

“Shoot her, Yellow. That's an order.”

“Yessir, deploying second tranquilizer now. First death on my record in a decade, White. I hope you’re pleased.”

“Stop threateningly cocking your gun at me, all right? The Target is alive, but is now unconscious. She's a tough kid, I’ll give her that.”

“Boys, focus. Inject the Target, collect her, and get out of there. You’ve already been in the open too long.”

“Yes, Green. Injecting the P-72 Morphic serum now. Hey, there’s a Pokéball on a chain around her neck.”

“Take it. It’s probably just a pet, but we can always use fresh Pokémon.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve got it.”

“Is there any sign of drug rejection, White?”

“Negative, Green. She's taking it well. The Morphic process has just begun.”

“That was quick.”

“I know. Maybe it was the extra sedative – make a note of that, Yellow, and we’ll look into it later.”

“Noted.”

“Report on the Target’s progress, White.”

“It’s moving along smoothly. She's shrunk to what appears to be final size, about the width of both of my hands. She's swamped in her clothes now, but earlier I saw white fur, elongated ears, at least one tail. My money’s on a Mankey, maybe, or a Meowth.”

“If final size has been achieved, bag her and get out of there. The last of the Morphic process can occur en route to headquarters.”

“Roger that, Green. Securing her now. Hang on…There’s a belt in the pile of clothes. It’s got five balls on it! Dammit, this Target’s a trainer!”

“You morphed a trainer? How could you – you know we can’t keep trainers; they’re too well-known! People will be looking for her! Maybe important people!”

“It was an accident, I swear! Her shirt was long and…wait. Yellow, can you hear that?”

“No. What is it? Sirens? Footsteps? The voices in your head telling you to do dumb things?”

“Would you stop _cocking your gun_ into my earpiece? And no. I think they’re wing beats. Something’s coming!”

“I can hear it now. And…the sky! Look up, it’s burning!”

“Holy mother of – it’s a Charizard! And it’s _angry_!"

“Retreat, both of you! I will _not_ lose operatives on a routine collection round for the sake of a trainer that we could never hold on to. Leave her and get out of there; she will die soon enough. The streets of Scarlet City are no place for an infant.”

“Copy, Green. Come on, White - we are _so_ gone.”

The Team Rocket scientists, while having had far too much time to watch poor quality black-and-white spy films, were nevertheless good at their job, both in the lab and in the field. And, being Rockets, retreating was their specialty.

* * *

Charizard were the subject of an ongoing research project at the laboratories of Professor Oak. They were mysterious creatures and didn’t give up their secrets easily, but there was one discovery that the professor thought might very well save many people and Pokémon trips to the hospital. Charizard, as a species, suffered from what Oak called Fire Rage. In situations that would result in adrenaline flooding the human body, pure lava coursed through Charizard veins. While this did not harm the Pokémon, it gave them a sense of imbalance that, combined with the circumstances that caused the reaction, often shoved the creature’s consciousness to the background of its mind; instinct took over. Even the most self-controlled Charizard was susceptible to the power of Fire Rage.

That night in Scarlet City, self-control was the last thing on Kindle’s mind. In fact, before his Fire Rage took over, the only thing on his mind was the fact that something was horribly wrong with Enya. (Why had he lost sight of her again? The smog was no excuse!) He didn’t know how he knew this, but he just _knew_ – and then he knew nothing but the roar of lava in his mind and the sheer ferocity of his protectiveness towards his trainer.

Kindle flew as quickly as he could back the way he had come, his gaping jaws pouring out flame that scorched the haze that cloaked him. (If asked, he would have said that he was clearing the air so he could search the ground better; but if pressed, he would have admitted that one Pokémon's wanton destructive tendencies were another Pokémon's catharsis and left it at that.) In any case, the Charizard followed his sharp nose; through the reek of fire and rot, Enya’s aroma was fresh on the breeze, in addition to two other human scents. His trainer smelled agreeably like ink and uncut grass; the other two smelled of fear and chemicals that clawed viciously at Kindle’s nose. Roaring loudly enough to rouse the city from its apathetic slumber, he tracked these scents to an intersection between two shadowed streets.

He landed lightly in the crossroads, wings open and snapping, tail whipping threateningly. This was where Enya’s trail dead-ended. But the only thing there that emitted her pleasant scent was a pile of cloth that slouched carelessly on the asphalt. Enya’s clothing? The shock of this realization – that Enya was lurking about somewhere without her fabric pelts – startled Kindle out of his Fire Rage. His trainer was, as most humans were, almost obsessive about covering her skin with odd and oftentimes unnecessary coverings. It was a human thing.

So what was Enya doing without her clothes?

A small noise, a sort of mewl, distracted Kindle from his musings. It came from within the folds of Enya’s clothing, and a soft shifting of cloth followed. Overcome with curiosity, he pulled back the layers of fabric – jacket, shirt, a bag that he pulled out and set aside for fear of squashing whatever it was that had made the noise – with the tips of his fearsome claws until he revealed a small mound of lightly breathing white fur: a newborn Pokémon kit of some kind, too small and curled up to be identified. The Charizard sniffed it, intrigued, and realized the creature was female, and furthermore was the source of Enya’s scent. In an embarrassing surge of instinct that had not seen light since he'd passed one hundred pounds and stopped being reflexively startled by every sudden movement, he snorted a small fireball in surprise – a little hunk of sulfur burning as red-hot as his insides. It landed innocuously enough on the pile of clothing but soon began to gnaw hungrily on Enya's beloved leather jacket, smoke rising in innocent curlicues into the air.

Kindle, panicked at the thought of being the death of a kit, snatched the newborn up and cradled her to his chest with one massive hand. The kit easily fit into his palm and seemed pleased, in her lethargic childlike way, to be next to a warm body. She purred slightly and uncurled. Large pointed ears tucked onto the curve of the back of her head came into view and a thick tail slipped out from its tightly held position. Kindle had just decided the creature had to be a weirdly formed Meowth when an almost incomprehensible mumble of _eev_ from the newborn derailed his guess and would have made him smack himself in the face if he hadn't been holding her. An Eevee, of course it was an Eevee. To be fair, Kindle had never seen an Eevee kit before, and had no way of knowing that they were born with white fur and grew the brown later on. The Charizard was very aware of his strength and did not like being around fragile things – much less fragile things that would die if he broke them. Children, generally speaking, he avoided at all costs.

Having reminded himself that he could accidentally crush the kit in his hands with very little effort, the Charizard cupped her gingerly to his chest again and watched with a rueful stare as the rest of Enya’s clothing began to smolder and ignite. Even if he put the flames out now, the fabric would be threadbare and sooty; his trainer was going to be so very angry when he found her, for a naked human was a sorry being. A sudden thought struck him, and he realized that if Enya was off without her clothes, the belt to which she attached the rest of the team’s Pokéballs was most certainly buried within the rapidly burning pile of pelts. Leaning his left half – the half that shielded the kit – awkwardly away from the blaze, Kindle plunged his other hand into his little inferno, anxiously groping about in the layers of disintegrating fabric until he felt a spherical object.

Daring to hope, the Charizard yanked the thing out of the fire; from it, a frail length of cinders and four other Pokéballs hung precariously. He sighed with relief and carefully set the balls to cool next to Enya’s bag, which he now realized that he had retroactively saved from a fiery doom. Finally a stroke of good luck this evening.

Disaster successfully averted – well, as much as was possible; his trainer’s clothes were still ruined – Kindle turned his attention back to the Eevee that smelled of Enya. During the Charizard’s panicked rescue of his teammates, the newborn had stretched out and gotten completely comfortable in his hand. Belly-up, the kit purred like a distant stampede of Tauros and seemed to have a pleased smile on her muzzle. A glint of shine in her belly fur caught Kindle’s eye; he oh-so-carefully parted the fur with the tip of his claw, slipped it underneath the sparkly thing, and lifted up. Stretched like a spider web over his claw was a thin, delicate gold chain that, from the looks of it, wrapped a few times around the Eevee kit. From the chain a clasp dangled, looking like it was designed to hold a locket. But Kindle knew better - the clasp was meant to hold a modified Pokéball. His, in fact.

Kindle was hit with a realization like a Thunder attack - this Eevee not only smelled of Enya, but, somehow, was Enya.

And if Enya was an Eevee kit, then nothing was as it seemed. The Charizard quickly extricated the newborn from the chain lest she accidentally choke herself and, for lack of a better option, slung it around his own neck, where it lightly hung on the curve of his chest. He sniffed about; the scent of chemicals and fear was almost entirely gone, but a couple of sources remained. His nose led him to the first where it lay balanced in a crack in the sidewalk: it was his own Pokéball, marked by the crude flame Enya had scratched on it in the early days of their friendship and the special clutch that coupled with the one on his trainer’s necklace. Kindle plucked the sphere up, growling at the thought of the ones who smelled so horrific putting their scent on it, and spent several frustrating moments wishing for smaller claws as he wrestled with reattaching it to the chain for safe-keeping.

The second source of the smell was hidden in the shadows, but shadows were little bother to a Pokémon with his tail on fire. Swishing his tail out in front of him, Kindle illuminated the sinister gleam of dark metal and, approaching, he reached down and picked up the black firearm. The Charizard held it up to his eyes and saw, lit by his flame, a bold red R emblazoned on the barrel of the dart gun. He immediately recognized the symbol of Team Rocket; the fist holding the gun clenched convulsively, and with a sharp crumple of metal the weapon was bent in half. Team Rocket had been the source of half of Enya’s troubles over the course of her journey so far, and Kindle had little love for them and their grandiose schemes. If they were responsible for this current predicament, he would be unsurprised.

Tossing the ruined gun onto a towering pile of empty Potion spray bottles, Kindle sniffed around, hoping to catch more of that foul scent, but doubting that he would. His nose was excellent; if he only smelled two sources, then there were only the two.

Enya – for, with the introduction of Team Rocket into the situation, Kindle was almost certain now that the Eevee kit was his trainer – stirred within the cradle of the Charizard’s hand. A low whimpering whine began to emit from the newborn and she frowned into his palm. Kindle nudged her gently, seeing if she could be consoled with contact, but this only prompted louder wails. The fire Pokémon concentrated on the flame within him, heating up his skin a bit in case Enya was cold, but that didn’t quiet the infant either.

Cursing his general lack of parental instincts and beginning to worry that Enya was going to attract undue attention with her cries (he didn't feel comfortable standing still while holding an infant, much less fighting), Kindle shushed and rocked her nervously as he made his way back to the canvas bag that belonged to his trainer and the five Pokéballs that contained the rest of his team. He scooped the latter one by one into the gaping top of the sack and then pulled the drawstring shut with the tips of his claws. He slung one strap of the bag over his right shoulder; it was a precarious fit as the Charizard’s shoulder was too muscular and awkwardly shaped for carrying human gear, but it would do until one of the more humanoid members of his team could take care of it. That would have to wait until Kindle was out of the city, though – his teammates were some of his closest friends and he would not expose them to Scarlet City if he could help it.

As Enya well and truly began to wail, her voice high and demanding, Kindle pumped his wings and flew once more into the murky haze that masqueraded as sky there. Though he cupped the kit closely to his chest to keep her from being bare to the biting winds and the thick smog, her yowls quickly gave way to shivers and sickly wheezes. Noting this, Kindle flew with single-minded purpose, straight as a Vine Whip out of Scarlet City’s boundaries of stone and stench. He headed instinctively for a small, peaceful glade that he had admired when they travelled through it earlier that day, shortly before the fateful battle in which he had been poisoned.

Struck with a memory as he flew, Kindle began to hum in a gravelly bass a silly little lullaby that Enya had made up and sung to him when he was a Charmander and had had trouble sleeping. He didn't remember any of the words, or even much of the tune if the truth was told, but that sort of thing had never stopped him before and he certainly wouldn't let it stop him now. Besides, as he began a second repetition of the song, he noticed that the Eevee kit was silent, breathing steadily, her unexplained discontent forgotten for the moment in the wake of slumber. The Charizard smiled, his eyes soft as he cracked open his hand to peek at the tiny kit, and slowed down his wing beats to keep time with the half-remembered lullaby.

Kindle flew on steadily, his main regret for the moment only that Enya was in no state to be teased about the fact that, in spite of all her protesting, she still ended up flying with him.


	2. The Mysteries

“Opening a door to the mysteries, hoping to shed a little dark on all the stuff we think we know”

* * *

A couple hours past sunrise, the enigmatic peace that had settled over the unlikely pair of Pokémon was shattered by unadulterated silliness. Or so Kindle thought to himself as he dodged the large, gaping mouth that snapped at him enthusiastically. The Golbat was big, to be sure – no doubt hopped up on Proteins, the way some trainers operated these days – but she was probably a couple dozen levels lower than him and had no type advantage. He could take this overgrown pest apart with no trouble – and he was, in fact, gathering up a Flamethrower in his chest when he remembered.

Enya. There was no way she’d survive the heating of the Charizard’s skin when he unleashed his attack. And having her in a battle at _all_ was a risk that the fire-type dared not take. Fighting was not an option, nor fleeing, for a chase was almost as bad as a battle. That left negotiation, which was not exactly his strong suit, but he'd try anything once.

“Sister!” Kindle cried out quickly, banking his inner flame and ducking his long neck to avoid a poorly aimed Giga Drain attack. It was considered polite to speak formally when addressing an unknown Pokémon and especially when making a request such as stopping a fight. Was it awkward and stilting for both parties? Absolutely. But polite, damn it. “Sister, hear my petition!”

The Golbat, a Confuse Ray faltering in her wide-open mouth, keened softly and considered Kindle’s plea, which was, granted, an unusual one to receive from an obviously powerful opponent in the midst of a battle. She stalled, flapping her wings vigorously but only in order to hover, and inclined her head permissively. “Speak, brother.”

“Thank you,” Kindle breathed with relief; both Pokémon ignored the confused shouts of the Golbat’s trainer below. “I am carrying a child right now." Enya, proving that she the same ironic theatrical timing now as she had as a human, chose that moment to begin her piercing litany of wails again. "I cannot do battle.”

“A baby?” the poison-type grunted doubtfully, tilting her head downward, to where her trainer was urging her loudly to keep fighting. “It is hardly a Charmander, brother, you have in your hands. You expect me to believe a wild Pokémon has a child not of its species and does not intend to eat it?"

“ _No_! I mean, yes. I mean, she is an Eevee, and I am not wild. She is…from my team.” Kindle realized that his explanation was suspiciously vague, but it was more or less the truth. “ _Please_ ,” he continued, barging urgently through the Golbat’s sharp look of skepticism – she was probably reconsidering obeying her trainer’s commands to battle once more – and raised his voice to be heard over Enya’s cries. “Let us pass without trouble. I do not wish to put the little one in danger.”

A gasp from the Golbat made Kindle spin about impulsively and tense, shielding Enya from the Screech or Confuse Ray that would surely burst from the other Pokémon’s mouth in a moment. When none came, he twisted his neck around and stared at his opponent, who was not, in fact, making any move to attack. In fact, she was just flapping her wings dumbly, gaping without a sound.

“Sister? Are you all right?” Kindle asked worriedly, though his back displayed muscles still taut with anticipation of an attack.

“Brother. You - that _scar_. You are the one…you are…you’re _Kindle_ , aren’t you?” The formality vanished from the Golbat’s suddenly higher voice and her eyes shone. It was not a look the Charizard had seen on a blood-sucking poison-type before and hoped he never would again.

“Um. Yes.” The Charizard turned around to face her again. “Have we met?”

“No, but I’ve heard of you! You’re only one of the most famous Pokémon _in the world_ – my trainer and I watched you and your team defeat the Elite Four on his box of glowing images. I _saw_ you get that scar!”

Kindle spared a glance for the large, ragged trail of scar tissue that extended up the deep blue membrane of his left wing. A keepsake from his fight with dragon master Lance’s highest-level Dragonite. “Ah, yes. That. It’s always gratifying to realize that your most humiliating wound was inflicted on national television.”

The Golbat’s voice went up another two octaves; soon it would be audible only to others of her species. “It _is_ you!” She exploded into a small loop-the-loop as if her excitement was too much for her to bear while still. “I’m your number one fan, Kindle! I’m Breeze – well, that’s my birth-name, my given-name is just Golbat – and you are my _absolute favorite flying-type ever_. Well, that’s not to say that _Torrent_ from your team isn’t quite nice too, but I always preferred the flying-type with wings. I can’t believe I’m _hovering right here talking to you in real life and_ –”

“Erm. That’s lovely, um, Breeze. May we please pass now?” Enya’s complaints were beginning to die down and Kindle wanted to get a move on before she changed her little mind about being quiet.

“Of course! An _Elite Four champion_ would never lie!” Her eyes widened in horror, the pupils huge and black with panic. “I’m so sorry about before! I didn’t know who you were then, and I’m _so so sorry_.”

“That’s just fine, Breeze. Commendable, even. But I should get going – farewell!” Kindle took off in an instant, speeding away from the Golbat as quickly as he had fled Scarlet City. This was not the most glorious, nor polite, leave-taking, but fans – especially die-hard ones like Breeze – always made Kindle uncomfortable. He liked the knowledge that he had defeated the Elite Four. Of the prestige that came of it he was less fond.

A screech came from behind him and he glanced back reluctantly to see the Golbat diving towards her trainer, who was at this point thoroughly bewildered and cringing away from his overexcited Pokémon. The cool winds brought to Kindle’s ear slits a few last parting words: “He said my name, Chris! Kindle. Said. My. Name! Twice, even! He said I’m commendable! He _loves_ me!”

* * *

By the time Kindle reached the clearing again, about an hour later, his muscles were beginning to ache just a slightest bit; his scarred wing always acted up after long-distance flights. He landed softly so as not to jostle Enya, who had fallen asleep again, but the vibration caused by his not inconsiderable weight striking the ground startled a Rattata out of the undergrowth. The little purple creature spat a few choice curses at the Charizard and disappeared quickly into the brush; the rest of the clearing was barren of Pokémon life.

It was high time, Kindle decided, to have a team meeting. Still cradling the Eevee kit to his chest with a fist that was occasionally bumped by the lightly swinging chain and ball that hung around his neck, the Charizard shrugged Enya’s bag off of his shoulder and opened a gap in the top with one heavy foot. One, two, three, four, five Pokéballs rolled out with a bit of nudging and lay unassumingly on the ground.

It always interested Kindle that his teammates, some of the strongest Pokémon in all Kanto, could be contained within the same delicate devices that entrapped low-level Caterpie and Geodude. But now, he reminded himself sternly, was not the time to ponder the Pokémon condition. Bending down slightly, he jabbed at the button in the center of the balls one by one where they lay. And one by one, Enya’s prized team emerged into the sunshine, enveloped by an unearthly red light.

First out of the ball – as she always liked to be – was Zap, her cheeks sparking in preparation for battle even before the red glow cleared. The Raichu, caught off guard by seeing only Kindle, took a step back and twitched her tail and ears curiously. The first words out of her mouth were, “Where’s Enya, Scarizard?” supplemented by an indignant hiss when Kindle held up an I'll-tell-you-later finger and moved to the next ball.

Out came Torrent, who towered above the surrounding trees until he realized that he was doing so and lowered his serpentine body to the ground. His blue scales gleamed warmly in the sun as he took in Zap's low cursing and Kindle's progression to another Pokéball. The Gyarados coiled himself up neatly, his mild expression belying his ability to level a town when the mood took him.

Mirage floated peacefully from her ball as if wholly unmoved by the experience of becoming corporeal; she didn’t even open her eyes, merely taking stock of the situation with her psychic powers, and Kindle shook his head before picking up the next ball. The Kadabra liked to demonstrate her superior sensory abilities at every opportunity and turned "stoically silent" into an art form, but those in the know quickly figured out that it was all an act she liked to cultivate. Well, partially an act, because Mirage really was that good, even if most of her air of detachment was unnecessary theatrics.

Zephyr emerged, springing into the air and screeching a challenge. After he realized that there was no battle imminent, the Aerodactyl landed heavily, his ancient eyes clouded with confusion, and scented the air suspiciously. “I scent Master Enya in this gentle breeze; my sight is keen, and yet I cannot see her. Where is she?” While modern Pokémon spoke formally only when custom dictated it, the archaic rock Pokémon’s language was, like his body, from a time long ago when covenance was the norm. To his credit, he took Kindle's preemptive wait-for-it finger much better than Zap had, with only an off-put sniff and a resettling of his wings.

Finally, and with no small amount of hesitation on Kindle's part, Gale erupted from her Pokéball like she had been waiting to be released. She looped agitatedly once around the clearing before snapping to a halt, nose-to-nose with the Charizard. “Where is Enya,” the Dragonair asked, her voice taut and unyielding. It was not a question, it was a statement of fact: Enya was missing, Kindle knew where she was, and he _would_ tell her.

When Kindle did not immediately respond, opting instead to glance nervously down at the fist he had cupped to his chest, Gale twitched her tail and, quick as lightning, wound it around the Charizard’s long neck. Jerking him closer with her tail, as a human would another by his lapels, the Dragonair spoke through clenched teeth, “Something is wrong with her. I know it; I can feel it here.” She dipped her chin to indicate the blue sphere nestled in the curve of her neck, where the hearts of Dragonair beat out the quick rhythm of their lives.

“Hrrk,” Kindle responded, unable to formulate full words with Gale’s ribbed tail jabbing into his throat.

The rest of his teammates, who had been circling progressively nearer as it became clear that something happened to their beloved Enya, sighed as one. As Gale drew closer and closer to evolution, she became more and more belligerent. This, according to Enya’s Pokédex, was a common occurrence for Dragonair on the brink; she would return to her amiable self after evolving. But until then, tolerance was key.

“Erm, Gale?” Zap piped up, punctuating her sentence with a tiny zap of electricity. It wasn’t meant to hurt; an attack was often the only way to get the dragon-type’s attention when she was in one of her moods. “Gale?” A slightly stronger shock danced up the serpent’s body and finally succeeded in rending the Dragonair’s attention away from her victim. “Would you quite mind,” the Raichu continued blithely, “not choking our trainer’s favorite Pokémon?”

An infuriated hiss was Gale’s only response, but she gave Kindle one last shake and unwound her tail with reluctance. But that last thrash was the proverbial straw that broke the Ponyta’s back: a staccato wailing began emitting from the Charizard’s hand. (Kindle winced, his head beginning to throb softly in time with the howls: listening to Enya screech was getting very old, very quickly, but he still could not for the life of himself figure out what it was she wanted.)

“What is that?” Gale, barely a second gone, was back and as suspicious as ever. “What _is_ that?” Her tail whisked around and wrapped around the fire-type’s wrist, yanking it away from his chest and towards her. The cries grew louder (Zap covered her sensitive ears with a wince and muttered that someone else could stop the overgrown serpent this time) and Kindle looked with panic from his hand, where a short white tail hung sadly from between his fingers, to Gale’s face where sharp teeth were bared in a scowl.

Tolerance, the Pokédex had said. Tolerance was key.

But Enya needed help, and if Gale was going to get in the way of that, tolerance would have to wait a while. Giving in to his instincts, Kindle snatched back his hand and snarled into the Dragonair’s shocked face. The growl was not the language of Pokémon; it was less and somehow more than that, a primal snarl that warned the one to whom it was directed to stay away _or else_. Gale flinched and retreated, her own growl stuttering and fading quickly.

Slightly disappointed in his show of primitivism, Kindle frowned and looked down into his hands, where the Eevee kit was curled up in a display of abject misery. In spite of the Charizard’s fearsome looks and short temper, he really did prefer to settle things through words, as he had with the Golbat earlier.

“Don’t beat yourself up, Kindle,” Torrent reassured him knowingly, sending Gale a sharp look. “She earned that.” Gale hissed but kept her peace; one did not growl as Kindle had without meaning it utterly.

“Indeed she did,” Zephyr affirmed, and a light chorus of agreements went round the ragged ring of Pokémon (excluding, of course, Gale herself, who instead made an offensive gesture with her tail). “But her question was fair and valid: what is it that you hold within your hand? It sounds like a newborn child.” He sniffed the air noisily and exhaled in shock. “But it _smells like_ –”

“Like Enya,” Kindle finished for the Aerodactyl. “I know. That’s because it – she – is Enya.” He cupped his hands together and opened them to the air; the wailing, grown soft after having been ignored, picked up again, strident and needy.

Torrent leaned forward and hovered inquisitively over the Charizard’s palms, while Zap sprang agilely to perch his head, still covering her ears desperately but craning her neck to see. Zephyr shuffled closer – he was never at his most graceful when on the ground – and peered at the kit with gentle, amber-yellow eyes. Gale huffed and feigned disinterest, but soon wandered, apparently aimlessly, over to Kindle and his handful. Even Mirage floated forward for a closer look, curiosity warring with the serenity that usually decorated her face.

After a pregnant pause, Zap scoffed. “That, my dearest Kindle, is a Pokémon, and a kit to boot. It may have escaped your notice, lightning-brain, but our Enya is an almost grown human.” The other Pokémon began to break apart, in accord with the Raichu’s judgment.

“Yes, she was,” Kindle concurred, gazing softly at the kit and speaking over her cries, ignoring his team’s looks of bewilderment, “before Team Rocket got their hands on her.”

“Team Rocket?” Torrent rumbled, back in an instant. Despite his appearance and appetites, he was as peace-loving as they came, and the rest of his team could hear the apprehensive tremble in his voice. Still, he would fight without a second thought for Enya’s sake, and was as fond of Team Rocket and their antics as Kindle was.

The Charizard glanced up, recognizing that he had attention from his teammates once more. “You heard me,” he declared defiantly. “Team Rocket.” He proceeded to tell the tale of the events that occurred in Scarlet City, speaking more and more loudly as time went on in order to be heard over Enya’s increasingly noisy, demanding wails.

There was another loaded silence, broken only by the kit.

Then: “ _You left Enya in Scarlet City_?” Gale screeched. Some parental reflex kicking in – _about time_ – Kindle jerked his hands back to his chest and shielded the kit protectively.

“No offense, Kindle,” Zap shouted from where she crouched on Torrent's head, her tiny paws flattening her ears against her head, “but are you on the Candy? I’m serious here.”

An indignant growl escaped the Charizard, echoed by the loyal Torrent who always wanted to believe the best of people. “I haven’t touched a Rare Candy in ages. I am eight months clean and you know it.”

Zap acceded easily to this with a nod but maintained, “A transformation like you’re describing, though, is magic, and Team Rocket is not magical.”

“Nor even particularly smart,” Gale agreed, lashing her tail and narrowing her hard blood-red eyes. A cautionary cuff from Zephyr’s wing kept the Dragonair from expressing her opinion on Kindle’s intelligence as well.

“How do you explain the necklace, then?” Kindle insisted, jabbing his free finger at the thin chain and ball that hung around his neck. “Or the scent? Scent doesn’t lie!”

“We should, I believe, continue this argument at a later time and in a less communal venue,” Zephyr interrupted sharply. “We – though, I am inclined to believe, mostly the child – are garnering unsolicited attention.” He angled his head to the treetops round the clearing: a Mankey, several Beedrill, and a small flock of Spearow ducked conspicuously back into the foliage when the entirety of Enya’s team followed the Aerodactyl’s line of vision to them.

“But what about Enya?” Gale insisted. “You left her! We must go back to Scarlet City.”

“Can we make the kit be quiet now?” Zap’s pitiable voice piped up and was ignored.

Kindle growled, feeling like he was repeating himself but unable to resist. “I did not leave her! This Eevee _is_ Enya!”

“ _Later_ , you two,” Torrent interjected. While Gale and Zap seemed to be convinced that Kindle was either insane or scheming – possibly both – the Gyarados would always take Kindle at his word, for better or worse. Zephyr appeared to be holding out judgment and Mirage was, as always, inscrutable. “Enya’s not totally incapable of taking care of herself without us.”

“All right, all right,” Kindle agreed readily enough, banking on what little support he had. “We can have this out later. But where should we go? I know for a fact that Enya won’t be around to tell us what she had planned.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Zap shouted, finally snapping, leaping off of Torrent dramatically. “Just shut that kit up!” Sparks of agitation flickered over her cheeks and peppered the soil and grass around her.

“I wish I could!” Kindle shouted back, holding the newborn out in his cupped palms. The Pokémon still lurking in the trees scattered frantically at this roar. “I don’t know what she wants!”

“You do not know?” Gale asked, true surprise breaking through the cynicism in her voice for the first time in ages. Then the pessimism was back: “No, I suppose you would not, you being a useless male.”

There was a token protest from Kindle, Torrent, and Zephyr.

“She is _hungry_ , twister-brain.”

“Hungry?”

“Yes. Hungry. You are familiar that hunger, I assume?” Gale twisted the base of her tail into a loose cradle and held it out. “Give her to me,” she said, and her voice was soft enough – gentle, for the first time in months – that Kindle complied, astounded. The Eevee kit paused in her wails to purr approvingly at the smooth, cool scales on her fur after Kindle’s perpetually warm hands, and while she was thus distracted Gale rocked her lightly, swinging her tail in a small, repetitive arc. The soothing motion – back and forth, back and forth – quickly began to lull the kit to sleep. The clearing seemed to hold its breath.

“Can you keep doing that? Like, forever?” Zap asked, relief saturating her voice. Zephyr nodded eagerly in agreement.

Gale snarled deep in her chest and looked daggers at the rest of her team, though the greater part of her glare was heaped upon the hapless Kindle. “No, because it is not going to work much longer. A kit needs both food and sleep, but you cannot replace one with the other.”

“Dex says that newborn Eevee need either their mother’s milk – the species of the mother is unimportant, whether she is an Eevee or one of its evolutions – or a special species-specific formula, available at most breeding centers.” Zap, her ears no longer the victims of aural assault, had made herself useful. She held in her tiny paws Dexter, Enya’s trusty encyclopedic device, wrested from the depths of the trainer's canvas bag. Many of Enya’s belongings – a Full Heal, a scarf, a coin purse, a little book, a few Hyper Potions, a granola bar – were strewn about her carelessly, evidence of her search for the device.

“Twisters,” Gale swore, just as Kindle spat out, “Cinders.” After glancing bemusedly at her teammate (had they just expressed the same sentiment about something?), the Dragonair continued, “Are you sure, Zap?”

The electric rodent gave Gale a flat stare and, without looking down, depressed a button on Dexter’s inner panel.

Dexter spoke up in his robotically informative tone: “Eevee. Gestation period, approximately sixty days. Newborns require either their mother’s milk – the species of the mother is unimportant, whether she is an Eevee or one of its evolutions – or a special species-specific formula, available at most breeding centers. Newborns are unable to thermoregulate and are blind, deaf, and toothless for the first two weeks of life.”

Zap smirked and snapped Dexter shut with finality, a lone self-satisfied spark skittering over her fingers. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“So we need to find a breeding center,” Torrent said, leaning close to the kit in her makeshift cradle, his dangling, whisker-like barbels brushing against her muzzle. She purred and batted at them in her sleep, and the fearsome Gyarados smiled softly.

“Thank you for that statement of obvious fact.” The bite was back in Gale’s voice, and Torrent yanked his head back. “The question is, where to find one?”

“Scarlet City is out of the question,” Kindle said immediately. No one dared argue with the sudden steel in his voice, not even Gale, though her eyes narrowed.

“Nearest breeding center is…” Zap was again proving her worth, leafing expertly through the small paperback that had been wrested from Enya’s bag in her hunt for Dexter. It was a guide book to the Kanto region, tattered with use. “We’re in this conveniently unnamed forest, right? About sixty miles southwest of Scarlet City?” She turned the book this way and that, squinting at the tiny maps. “The nearest breeding center is about one hundred seventy-ish miles that way.” The Raichu pointed confidently between Zephyr and Mirage.

“I suppose we’ll keep you around, Zap.” Kindle smiled and spread his wings. Zephyr followed suit, and Torrent and Gale quickly readied for flight. The Eevee kit was still nestled within the curves of the Dragonair’s tail, which swung perfunctorily beneath the rest of her serpentine body.

Zap scoffed and began heaving Enya’s belongings back into her bag. “You _know_ you’ll keep me around. I’m the only one with opposable thumbs, remember?” She quickly shoved in the clothing, book, pouch, food, medicine, Dexter, and, after a moment’s contemplation, the five loose Pokéballs. She was left with a distended canvas bag easily half again as large as she was.

“Mirage has opposable thumbs.” The Charizard held out his hands to Gale, clearly demanding that she return the Eevee to him. She snapped warningly at his fingers. Kindle snarled, nose to nose with her and smoking slightly; she bared her teeth in response, but allowed the fire-type to pluck the sleeping kit from her tail.

Zap rolled her eyes, both at Kindle’s comment and his and Gale’s interaction. Her deft fingers shut the bag and pulled the drawstring tight. “Mirage isn’t really a tactile, book page-turning sort of Pokémon, Kindle.” Her voice grew louder. “She’s probably too busy being enigmatic to even carry this bag for me.”

Mirage’s lips quirked and one dark eye cracked open to gleam with mock offense at the Raichu. A blue aura obligingly surrounded the bag, lifting it from Zap’s fingers and hefting it onto the Kadabra’s humanoid shoulders. She lost an exaggerated two feet of height and made a show of adjusting the heavy backpack while Zap exclaimed her thanks and darted swiftly to Torrent, who lowered his neck and allowed her to perch on his massive head.

As one, they took off in a flurry of ridged wings, thrashing tails, and shimmery psychic haze. Though some of them wore scowls, some furrowed brows, and one a miserable grimace, they leveled without thought into their usual flight formation: Kindle at point, with Gale and Mirage behind him, and Zephyr and Torrent (Zap clinging to his head spines) behind them. They quickly disappeared into the swirling white clouds that danced in the air above them, so markedly different from the stagnant smog of Scarlet City’s sky.

The Eevee kit slept on, but the miserable grimace was hers.


	3. All Hell Breaks Loose

“Someone asked them to be quiet, so it's just a matter of time before all hell breaks loose”

* * *

 “Congratulations, gentlemen. You now outrank mayonnaise on the list of things that turn my stomach.” Her tone was appropriately disgusted.

“You keep a list?”

“Shut up, Yellow.”

A timid quake shivered in his voice. “Could…would you explain your turned stomach, please, sir?”

“Nothing would please me more, White. I am referring to last night’s, um, outing. In which you two returned to base, having lost the evening’s fourth Target, _post-morph_ , after being attacked by an apparently rogue Charizard.”

“To be fair, you did tell us to leave it and run.” The words bit resentfully into the air.

“Watch your step. The last thing you need is to be even further on my bad side right now.”

“Sorry. You were saying something about White’s and my outing?”

“So I was. Not only did you lose a Target – using a morphic injection that runs at about a quarter of your annual salaries per dose, I might add – it was a trainer.”

“I thought you decided to let the trainer slide. First time for everything and all that.”

“And so I had, until my Saturday morning cartoons were rudely interrupted by this.”

A soft clicking sounded and a television screen flickered once before settling into a soft rush of white noise and the crisp image of a solemn woman in blue. She spoke: “…lines open twenty-four seven. Please help us find this girl.” The image jumped, leaving the woman’s pixilated face smeared comically across the screen, and then reset her in her original spot.

She began again. “Citizens, we interrupt your regular broadcast to ask for your help. Many of you are familiar with this face” – a small picture appeared in the top left corner of the screen, a dark-skinned teenage girl with spiky brown hair, peppery green eyes, and a gentle smirk – “and we are requesting that you keep an eye out for it. For those of you who are not aware, this is a picture of Enya Lyle, sixteen years old, current champion of the Kanto Pokémon League. She was to be at an extremely important meeting with the Elite Four this morning but never showed; she is not responding to any attempt to contact her, and we are unable to get a lock on her Pokédex tracker. If any of you have seen her, please contact us here at the Celadon City police station. We will have tip lines open twenty-four seven. Please help us find this girl.”

The television whirred and turned off, plunging the room into suddenly petrified darkness.

“Now, when were you boys going to tell me that you morphed Enya Lyle?”

A voice squeaked, coughed overly deeply, and tried again. “That girl was Lyle? The Kanto Champion?”

“I thought she was at least in her twenties, to have a team like she does. After all, she has a full-grown Chariz…a Char… _oh_.” The other voice trailed off, the horror in the atmosphere bleeding into the words.

“Oh, yes. Connect those dots.” She sneered. “You were lucky last night, gentlemen. That Charizard, birth- and given-name Kindle, Lyle’s steadfast and loyal Pokémon, was put on a watch-list last year for assaulting and gravely wounding a common mugger – who eventually died from his burns – while under the influence of Rare Candy. The Charizard, not the mugger.”

“That _thing_ is a Candy addict?”

“Supposedly clean, now. Once Lyle figured everything out, she detoxed him. But there were a couple of beautifully violent weeks when all was said and done.”

“Green, what are we going to do?” The desperation coloring the words clawed free of his throat.

A deliberately light scoff. “You’re the scientists. I’m just the boss.”

“Meaning what?” This was whispered.

“Meaning, I tell you what to do, and you do it." A pencil snapped with a noise like a gunshot in the deathly quiet room. "Meaning, find a solution to this problem, White. Now.” She spat words out in time to the ominous cracking of her knuckles.

“But sir, you said it yourself. She probably died out there!

"And if she's dead, so be it. But find out what happened for sure – underestimating this girl was what led to Giovanni's downfall. I'm taking no chances and would rather not have anyone sniffing around here for the damn Kanto Champion if I can avoid it, thank you very much."

"But –”

“Now, if you please, get the hell out of my office before I restrict your lab time and add vegetables to your diet.” A chair scraped back in an obvious prelude to fleeing. “Hell, I could even fire you if you want to push me.”

“ _Green_ –”

“Do not make me repeat myself, boys.” The voice was simultaneously ice and fire. "I have a gun as well as a badge, and a rather spotty record to go with it."

The door to Green’s office slammed shut and alarmed whispers erupted in the hallway outside. She might not have been a fire-spitting Charizard, but people tended to flee from her wrath in short order anyway.

* * *

The breeding center, a large, sprawling facility, would not have been out of place in Celadon City – it was all metallic walls and shiny windows and automatic doors that slid open as Kindle led the descent over the center’s domed glass roof. What was strange was its utter isolation: as much as the center looked like it belonged in a metropolis, it was surrounded by nothing but a couple dozen sturdy-looking corrals and miles of open grassland. A single one-lane dirt road wove its indecisive way from the distant horizon to the front doors.

Noting the peculiar seclusion of the breeding center, Kindle landed heavily, checked on the slumbering Enya, and then turned to supervise his team’s landing. It was odd, he knew, to oversee such a standard thing with his highly trained teammates, but Zephyr had once sneezed and collided with Torrent just before touching down, and the resulting scuffle left a fifty foot furrow in some poor farmer’s blooming turnip field. Kindle believed in being safe rather than sorry.

But the landings went smoothly enough, tussocks of grass flattening underneath heavy feet and tails as they settled. Mirage, of course, declined to land at all, hovering smugly at eye level. The sun, low in the sky, reflected softly off of the glossy exterior of the center and bathed the team in a golden late-afternoon glow.

“Seems kind of empty,” Torrent commented, maneuvering his body to peer into the main building; the automatic door whirred and opened obligingly to reveal a glossy but barren lobby.

“Not at all,” Zap replied from the top of the Gyarados’ head, sniffing the air avidly. “Not many humans, sure, but there are all sorts of Pokémon in this complex.” She started, a realization dawning on her delighted face. “I’ll bet that some of those buildings are solely for breeding purposes. This is a breeding center, after all. I wonder if they put something in the air to make the Pokémon want to reproduce _right now_.”

“And that's as far as _that_ line of reasoning will go,” Kindle interrupted hurriedly.

“We are not here to investigate breeding center methodology; we are here for a starving kit.” Gale briefly looked embarrassed to have had to agree with the Charizard, and in an blatant attempt to cover her discomfort, she turned to him threateningly, snaking her tail around his shoulders and skimming her ribbed tail tip through the Eevee’s fur. “She is hot, furnace hands. Give her to me.”

Kindle gave Gale an appraising look and then nodded, carefully depositing Enya into the waiting cradle of her body. Taking advantage of his newly freed hands, the Charizard gestured to Torrent and Zephyr. “You two, take the perimeter. Talk to some of the Pokémon out in the corrals, see if this place is okay. I don’t expect trouble, but being alert never hurt anyone.”

There were immediate nods of assent and a rustling of scales and wings. “Good move,” Torrent approved. “Remember that fancy casino that was actually Team Rocket?”

Kindle flinched; he remembered. “The rest of us will go inside, see if we can get Enya some formula. We’ve got a lot of those human coins in her bag.”

Zap propelled herself away from Torrent, her face lighting up in both the literal and figurative sense. “We get to go _inside_ the breeding center? Awesome! Attractive male Raichu, here I come.”

A look of complete alarm flitted across Kindle’s face, both at the image conjured by the electric-type’s words and at the excited sparks dancing on her cheeks. “On second thought, Zap, why don’t you go with the boys?”

“Aw, lightning.”

The curse was backed by a stormy scowl and a Thunderbolt, but Kindle, unfazed, ducked with the ease of long practice. Drawing upon his assumed authority among his teammates, he ordered, “Zap. You _will_ go with the boys.”

Torrent chuckled deeply and even Zephyr had to hide a smile, the equivalent of uproarious laughter in any other Pokémon. “We shall take most excellent care of her in your absence, Kindle. I vow to you that she will not have opportunity to leave our sight.”

Zap glowered darkly as she made her reluctant way over to perch once more on Torrent’s head spines. “You know, Zeph, I never liked you. Never.”

“I’m sure he’ll survive somehow,” Kindle drawled, and Zephyr smiled toothily in agreement. A bitter hiss escaped from Zap, and her guardians shot one another a loaded look before taking off hastily. The last thing they needed at this point was their de facto leader struck down by resentful streaks of lightning.

“She is going to make you pay for that later,” Gale smirked as the two large Pokémon and their smaller passenger soared leisurely over to the corrals.

“I know,” Kindle sighed. “Please stop sounding so delighted at the prospect.” Wheeling about, he strode towards the front doors, which slid open once more in the automated hope that maybe someone would actually walk through this time. At the doorway, cool air from within bathing his face, he halted and turned his head back to his remaining teammates. A shrug on his shoulders and a quirk to his lips, he waited for them to join him, and then asked quietly, “So, you don’t think there actually are chemicals to make you want to mate in here, do you?”

Gale scoffed and, though her tail was full of newborn, managed to shove Kindle aside as she entered without a second thought. The Dragonair coiled herself neatly in the center of the lobby and breathed in exaggeratedly. She narrowed her scarlet eyes at the Charizard and let the air out in an aggressive snort. “I have no sudden desire to further my species. You should be safe.”

The fire-type narrowed his own rust-colored eyes in return. “Thank you _so_ much.” He walked into the tasteful atrium, followed by Mirage, the claws on his feet clacking against a stone floor that appeared to be, thankfully, designed to resist chipping. To his right and left were more automatic doors that opened to connecting walkways between buildings, handsome bronze plaques to the sides indicating that each led to the nursery, breeding rooms, health center, corrals, kennels, or offices. Directly in front of him was a shiny marble counter, tinted pink, and to either side of it were frosted glass doors, one labeled STORAGE in neat black stenciled letters and the other labeled SHOP.

The three teammates, after much jockeying for the point position on the part of Kindle and Gale, found themselves standing before the stone counter. A small golden bell sat on the surface amidst a few scattered papers and several gnawed-on pencils, in addition to a distressing number of pill bottles and syringes. There was also an interestingly diverse array of pamphlets stacked unevenly on the edge – everything from _What to Expect When Your Jynx is Expecting_ and _Feet-First: Breach Birth in Quadruped Pokémon_ to _How to Train Your Dragon-Type_ and _Hair Where?: A Guide to Venonat Pubescence_. In short, the counter was a mess, but at least it was a mess related to Pokémon breeding. That, Kindle decided, was a good sign.

He hoped.

Taking in Gale’s occupation with Enya and his own cumbersome claws, the Charizard turned apologetically to Mirage. “You wouldn’t mind, would you?” he asked, gesturing to the little bell, which he had seen once in a bank that Enya had visited. It rang disproportionately loudly and usually brought local employees running.

Mirage eyed Kindle for a moment with an expression that said, “First the bag, now this?” but tapped the bell without any argument and even cracked a smile at the emphatic ring. Immediately, a shout sounded from behind the storage room door, followed by a subsequent series of yelps that grew louder as their origin drew near.

“Please pretend you didn’t hear any of that just now!” a male voice called out. The door handle jerked, and a shadow behind the glass heaved itself against the door, which stayed resolutely shut. A few moments of contemplation, and the handle jerked again. This time, the door was pulled and opened easily, and the shadow formed into a pale, slightly overweight human with a brown mohawk, tattered jeans, and a yellow t-shirt that read _Well, that was Arbokward_. Kindle liked him immediately.

Arms wrapped around a massive cardboard box – that was, Kindle noted, upside down, and nearly half as tall as the man himself – the man staggered toward the shop with all the grace of a drunken Snorlax. “Sorry,” he grunted, his voice strained. “I’ll be with you in a moment, folks, if you could wait a minute for me to stock this.” His voice rose in both pitch and volume as the weight of the box shifted and he tottered to the side.

Enya suddenly woke at the sound of the man’s voice and found that she didn’t quite like the waking world, wailing her displeasure loudly. Mirage gave her one look, heaved a sigh, and closed her eyes wearily. She was a patient Kadabra, but everyone had their limits, and one hunger-induced tantrum was more than enough for the day. Her eyes snapped open and into a vivid shade of shimmering blue.

The man was enveloped in the same aura, which gently set him upright and plucked the box from his hands. The cardboard cube righted itself and its top flaps flipped up as the door to the store swept open. In short order, the contents of the box (small, densely packed cans of Pokémon food) were stacked neatly on the proper shelves, the door closed, the box flattened and placed in a recycling bin, and the man turned about sharply and given a slight nudge in the direction of his waiting customers.

Wide-eyed but curiously unflustered, he smiled genuinely and made his way behind the counter. “Neat trick,” he commented as he swept all of the papers and pencils and breeding paraphernalia to one side. His name tag, pinned at a haphazard angle on his shirt, was marked with scratchy lettering that spelled out _Jed_. “Now, shall I assume that all this fuss has something to do with your visit here?”

In response, Gale raised her tail and deposited the Eevee on to the counter; the cool stone made the kit shiver and cut off her cries, a pathetic whimper escaping before silence fell. Gale’s expression promised years of pain to Jed if he made one wrong move around the newborn as Kindle gently laid one warm hand over the little body.

Jed frowned and bent down to be at eye-level with the kit. “Eevee. Female. Very young. Probably newborn.” After a questioning glance upwards, he pulled up the Charizard’s heavy hand and expertly scooped the kit to his chest, manipulating her unresisting form with clinical interest. Peering into her ears and parting her silky white fur, he made a considering noise. “Like, really newborn. Like, newly born. Wow, she's young. Exhausted, but healthy enough at first glance. Still, I’ll need to take her to the health center for a proper check-up.” At an alarmed snort from the Charizard, he hastily added, “Don’t worry – it’s standard procedure for all young. She’s probably just fine.” Prying open the kit’s jaws to look at her mouth and probing her stomach, his forehead crinkled in a frown. “She’s never eaten, has she? Abandoned? You found her somewhere?”

Kindle considered this and nodded; the man’s guess was close enough to the truth.

“All right, then. I’ll just take her to the clinic for a quick check-up – you know, run a broad spectrum of tests to make sure she wasn’t born with and hasn’t picked up anything unfortunate, give her a physical, that sort of thing – and then I’ll be right back. I’ll get you situated with formula for her then and talk you through a few other child-rearing options.” Jed’s attire and organizational skills were unorthodox for one in the medical profession, but in his work he was all brisk competence, and Kindle appreciated that. “Where’s your trainer?” the man asked offhandedly as he pulled a small blanket out of a drawer beneath the counter and swaddled the kit within its folds.

Kindle started at the innocent question and Gale gave a low warning snarl. Jed, sensing that he was broaching forbidden territory, cringed apologetically. “Sorry; it’s just that we don’t normally get non-Union Pokémon in here without trainers, and you’re clearly not wild, and you have a Pokéball around your neck, and I’m going to shut up now. It’s none of my business, I see.” He stood awkwardly for a few moments, contrition scrawled on his features. “But I do need to make an at least partially complete record of your visit for my managers. Can I just say that you were sent by the Pokémon Union? They send Pokémon on their own every so often to pick up medications and supplies.”

At a sharp nod from Kindle, Jed beat a less than graceful retreat through the automatic doors to the health center, cradling the cloth-wrapped Eevee against his belly.

“We should not leave him alone with our kit,” Gale hissed, rounding on Kindle as the doors slid shut. The Charizard blinked but didn’t back down.

“I trust him,” Kindle stated firmly. “He’s a professional! Besides, we would have smelled deceit if he was planning on harming her – humans can’t hide anything.”

Gale growled but accepted that, satisfying herself with moving to the middle of the room and powering up several times for a Skull Bash. It was soothing, though it would have been even better if there were actually someone for her to attack. “He is an insensitive oaf whose hands are too large to properly handle a kit.”

Kindle frowned; the size of Jed’s hands was hardly his fault. “He’s male!”

“I believe I just said that.”

* * *

Singe carefully slotted the plank back into the corral fence; the fence was only moderately useful, barely operative as a barrier if you were a little Pokémon. It was a simple matter for a Raichu such as himself to remove a board and slip out unnoticed, as long as he came back and replaced the plank before Jed did his evening rounds. And after all, one had to face it: this might have been the swankiest breeding center in Kanto, but it was no amusement park. It was, in fact, with the exception of the occasional mating ritual, exceedingly dull.

Singe sighed with a tone of self-pity he felt no need to curb, turning away from the fence; his melodramatic breath ruffled the grass beneath his large feet. Then he stopped to frown; the grass was still moving. He glanced around himself curiously – this corral was very lush, and every inch of it was being windswept – before looking up. He let out a terrified shriek that he would deny to his grave and dove under a dense bush at the sight of a massive Gyarados overhead and its grey, winged companion. It was the rare Pokémon who would attack near a human establishment, but something primal in Singe’s mind reacted to the descending fangs and claws and sent him shivering into the brush.

The two enormous Pokémon landed gracefully, glancing around themselves with curiosity as Singe tried to melt into the grass beneath his paws. The Gyarados rumbled something softly and an irritated female voice – a _Raichu_ – responded clearly. “No, I am _not_ just trying to screw with Kindle’s instructions. This corral reeks of grass-types and poison; they’re here somewhere.”

Well, well, Singe thought, his fright suddenly forgotten. A frission of delight sang through his body. The female Raichu, who he could now see scowling from her perch atop the Gyarados’s head, was certainly attractive; lean muscle and a nice notch in her ear was evidence of a fierce battler. It was time to turn on the charm and see what he could do towards wooing the female and convincing her to bear his children. Fathering a litter was his ticket out of this center, and there hadn’t been any female Raichu checked in in the seven months he’d been stuck there.

He adopted a winning smile and swaggered out of the brush, confident that he’d be the only one in the corral to investigate the arrivals. (Everyone else was being subjected to their weekly check-ups: Singe had never been more grateful for the removable fence slat.)

The grey Pokémon must have heard his approaching footsteps because its massive head turned and hard amber eyes focused on him. Before Singe returned to terror, or indeed could react beyond the acceleration of his heartbeat, panic flashed across the unknown creature’s face and it drew in a sharp breath. It ground out in a deep, aged voice, “Torrent,” and flared one wing, the sun shining through the thin grey membrane, to shield the top of the Gyarados’s head. He attempted a remarkably wide apologetic smile at Singe, and the Raichu stopped short. _Lightning_ , the grey Pokémon had a lot of teeth.

The Gyarados, who was probably the one called Torrent since no self-respecting electric-type would name their child that, made quick eye contact first with the big grey Pokémon and then with Singe himself. The same panic graced his broad, blue face and he bucked his head back roughly. A feminine yelp followed by a less-than-feminine string of colorful curses fell to the ground and was suddenly muffled. (Singe’s brow furrowed, perplexed: both of the strangers could have squashed him like a Weedle without trying – though type advantage would even the odds minimally – so why did the sight of him fill these Pokémon with fright?)

The grey Pokémon’s wing snapped back into place with a dry rustling sound, and he nodded formally. “Greetings, Raichu.” His voice reminded Singe of the rumble of stone against stone.

Faced with so many teeth, the Raichu decided to be equally polite. “Singe,” he introduced himself, craning his neck slightly. He couldn’t see the female Raichu, but the Gyarados’s blue tail fin, pressed flat to the ground, had a small bulge and was cursing creatively. “You are?”

“Zephyr. Aerodactyl.” He nodded sagely at his water-type companion before adding, “This is Torrent. Gyarados.”

“And the female Raichu I saw?” Singe eyed the lump in Torrent’s tail and tried to keep the raw eagerness out of his voice.

The Gyarados stuttered and blatantly failed to make eye contact with him. “Fe-female Raichu? There was no female Raichu. Did you see a female Raichu, Zeph?”

“I did not.”

“See? No Rai _chu_!” This, Singe felt, would have been more convincing if Torrent’s voice hadn’t shot up in pain at the end. The Gyarados howled and yanked his tail up, curling it around his body protectively as the fin twitched and smoked and reeked of burnt flesh. The female Raichu picked herself up from where she had been pinned under his tail, muttering darkly under her breath. Sparks ran along the length of her body in a threat display as she brushed dirt from her fur. She was _beautiful_.

Moaning softly, Torrent licked at his charred tail fin and whined, “Zap, that _hurt_.”

“Poor baby,” the Raichu responded unsympathetically. “It was an _accident_.” She made quick eye contact with Singe and winked, smirking. He winked back, confidence bolstered, and strode forward, hoisting his charming smile back onto his face. “Now that that's behind us…hello, stranger,” the female – Zap, good name – purred, flattening her ears and circling around him on all fours. Singe had never been so happy to be intimidated in his life; she wanted this, too. "Been here long?"

Moving closer to Zap in a complementary counter-circle and tasting sweet freedom with every step, Singe eventually remembered to respond to her pleasantly suggestive comment. “Only as long as it took to meet you. I'd like to get to know you a bit better, if you want to go inside.”

At this, Zephyr, busy nosing at Torrent’s wound, huffed in alarm and slammed down his tail to block the two Raichu, the pointed barb at the end embedding itself in the earth between them. “Zap,” he said warningly. “Please recall Kindle’s directive for you.”

Zap leaped onto the blade of the Aerodactyl's tail and gave him a cheeky look. “What, to go with the boys? I remember that.” She slid down to stand beside Singe and jerked her thumb at him. “He’s a boy, and if you try to argue semantics with me I will shock you into next week.”

Torrent unwound his tail from around the rest of his body and gently set the fin, vertically, between Singe and Zap. Singe flinched a little at the sight of the electricity burn on the fin. “Kindle did have a reason for his order, you know.”

“Lightning, Torrent, I haven’t mated in ages. I am a grown Raichu; I can make my own life decisions. And Kindle, thank goodness, is _not_ my father.” Singe cheered Zap on in his head, leery of doing so aloud with a powerful tail so close to his smaller body. The Aerodactyl, however, seemed to know what he was thinking and gave him a sharp look.

“We all know that, storm-brain,” Torrent sighed. He moved his tail towards his body, pulling Zap closer to himself and leaving Singe behind. “But with all of the stuff that’s happening right now with Enya missing and the Eevee kit, do you really want risk maybe having a litter?”

Zap made a deep, scandalized noise, and suddenly Singe was desperate to see her expression through Torrent’s fin. As he reached out to push the charred tail aside gently, she laughed with absolute certainty, “Of course I don’t want a litter!”

Singe dropped his arms and stared blankly at Torrent's fin, frozen in place and watched closely by Zephyr. “You don’t want a litter?” Oh, not cool. Sounding like he was being strangled when he talked was not going to win him the affection of females.

“Of course not," Zap exclaimed. "Being pregnant is a nuisance. _Pups_ are a nuisance.” Bodily shoving aside her Gyarados friend’s tail to peer at him, her handsome brown eyes widened fractionally and her face fell. The pheromones in the air faded perceptibly. “You don’t want to go inside anymore, do you?”

“Not…not particularly, no.” Cringing, he hastily added, “Sorry. Not that you aren’t so attractive I almost wet myself a couple times while you were circling me, but fathering a litter is the only way I get to leave this place.” Oh, no, normal voice and weird words wasn't any better than strangled voice and okay words. Singe was never talking ever again.

Several moments of uncomfortable silence passed before Torrent sighed loudly. “Listen, Singe, I realize that this has been agonizingly awkward for you. But it actually wasn’t that much fun for the rest of us, either, so maybe we could just start over.” At Singe’s skeptical look, he smiled encouragingly. “Hi. I’m Torrent. Gyarados. Level fifty-three.”

Taking Torrent’s prompt, Zephyr bowed deeply and said, “I am called Zephyr. I am of the ancient species of Aerodactyl, and have been trained, also, to level fifty-three.” In spite of himself, Singe smiled at the blatant formality; apparently, the less flustered the Aerodactyl was, the more verbose he got. He turned expectantly to Zap.

The female Raichu rolled her eyes at him and scoffed, clearly unimpressed with the introductions charade, but Torrent nudged her and she staggered forward, glowering. “All right, all right, _fine_ ,” she scowled. “I’m Zap. Raichu, as I hope to lightning you know. Also level fifty-three.”

Singe winced. Not only was Zap beautiful, she was _powerful_. He could only be grateful that she wasn’t upset that he didn’t want to mate with her anymore, because that could have ended painfully for him. Realizing that the three others were looking at him expectantly, he gave a crooked smile. “Singe. Raichu. Level thirty-six. And may I just ask what it is with your trainer and level fifty-three?”

“Nothing special; she just likes leveling us up evenly, so one at a time in a round,” Torrent explained. “She’s practically religious about it, even if we’re about to face someone with a one-type team and one of _our_ team has a type-advantage, which I always thought was rather silly,” he confided before Zap punched his electricity burn. He hissed and carefully placed his tail behind him, as far away from the female Raichu as he could manage without moving. “And what, may I ask, was that for?” Singe wanted to ask the same question.

“Our trainer is either missing or…not herself, and you sit here criticizing her training techniques!” Zap exclaimed indignantly. Singe didn’t miss the hesitation in her voice when she said that her trainer might not be herself. “You sure as lightning didn’t mind them when we went to battle the Elite Four.”

Singe gaped, the puzzle of Zap’s pause abandoned. “You’ve gone up against the Elite Four?”

“And won, but that’s not the point.”

Ignoring the other Raichu’s cry of “And _won_?” Zap continued pointedly, apparently remembering something. “Oh, and speaking of our trainer, but not really, what’s it like here?”

“You beat the Elite Four?”

“And by ‘here,’ of course, I mean ‘at this breeding center,’ not necessarily just in this field.”

“The Elite Four as in, Lorelei, Bruno, Agatha, and Lance?”

“How is the staff?”

“And the Champion, too?”

Torrent turned wearily to Zephyr, sighing. “Why is everyone we meet dysfunctional?” The Aerodactyl agreed with a curl of his lip. “On three? One, two…”

Both Raichu froze in their parallel conversations at the dual growls of the larger Pokémon. The Gyarados cleared his throat politely and lowered his head to be level with the electric-types. “Yes, Singe, we beat the Elite Four. And the Champion, too, who, for the record, was an ass. Now, moving onward, I assume you’ve been here for quite a while. What is this breeding center like? Is the staff good?”

Gaping and dumbstruck at this confirmation of what was, in his mind, the ultimate show of talent, Singe stammered, “Well, right now most of the staff is on vacation, so it’s just Jed.” Recovering but apparently still incapable of closing his mouth, he added, “He’s not the brightest Electabuzz in the pack most of the time, but he’s very good with medicine and tries hard to keep us happy. And this, my terrifyingly large friend," he continued, regaining some of his dramatics, "is the most prestigious breeding center this side of Kanto. The Cardinal Center? No? Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of it.”

“We have not. Our Master never really had use for these centers of breeding, you understand.”

“I guess.” Singe nodded, the brown tip of his tail arching over his shoulder in the Raichu equivalent of a shrug. “ _My_ trainer didn’t either, for a while, but then he found out how much human money you can make by selling Pikachu pups. Apparently, they’re very popular.”

Zap hissed, quietly indignant. “That’s rough. He’d just take the pups from you and their mother and sell them?”

“He’s a human, and more importantly, he is my trainer. Money is important to him, so it’s important to me. I may not agree with him, but that’s just how it is.” Singe sounded mildly remorseful, giving Zap an apologetic glance, but he was resolute.

The female Raichu sighed. “I understand. That _is_ how it works.” On their own, after all, Team Rocket’s Pokémon were some of the friendliest creatures on the planet (she once had a perfectly fascinating discussion on fair trade Revives with a distracted Rocket’s Raticate), but they obeyed their vicious trainers without a second thought.

“But that is beside the point,” Singe went on determinedly, pointing with some flair at the metallic walls of the extensive facility. “The point is that this is the best breeding center in Kanto; there’s no safer place for Pokémon who need care.”

This was, of course, the point at which a throaty roar sounded from within the building, followed by a cascade of loud crunches and the tinkle of shattering glass.


	4. None of the Usual Rules

“this is the exact center of the universe which explains why none of the usual rules apply here”

* * *

Jed Claxton hurried back from the Health Center, distress scrawled across his soft features. Sheaves of paper were stuffed haphazardly under both arms, and in one hand he gripped several small paper bags while the other cradled a newborn Eevee gently against his belly. He burst, stumbling over his own feet in his haste, through the automatic doors to the lobby, clipping the door with one shoulder when it didn’t open quite fast enough.

The scene he barged into reminded him of one of those apocalypse films he had seen recently, two straight hours of shaky camerawork and cool special effects featuring an Moltres and the lovely Melissa Cambridge, who had to find a way to survive after all of the world’s volcanoes erupted simultaneously and hundreds of meteors fell from the sky. Upon reflection, the movie didn’t make much sense, but then, one did not go to see such movies for the plot – Melissa Cambridge was incredibly sexy and spent most of the duration of the film in thin clothing that was largely burnt off.

But that was not the point.

The point was that every other scene in the movie featured warring Pokémon, each of which seemed determined to end the other in the most brutal way possible. And now, Jed’s slightly terrified and frankly disbelieving eyes were taking in the visiting Dragonair and Charizard thrashing about the lobby in an aggressive bundle of bunched muscles and limbs, fire flaring and enraged snarls flying. The Dragonair had her jaws around the Charizard’s neck, and the fire-type had her roughly pinned down with his feet and hands as she writhed angrily and struck him in the side.

It was the Kadabra standing calmly to the side, looking as if this were a common enough occurrence, that stopped Jed from setting down the kit and entering the fray. (This was a breeding center, after all, and no place for death feuds.) One of his hands still cuddled the Eevee, swathed in a soft white blanket, against his stomach and stroked a thumb over her head; full of good medicine and warm formula, she would likely sleep for several more hours.

Breathing deeply and taking comfort from the psychic-type’s quiet confidence, Jed plunked the papers and bags on the edge of the counter and resisted getting in the way of what was apparently an acceptable form of stress release, as long as no lasting damage – to bodies or property – occurred.

He only lasted in his resolve until the Dragonair’s powerful tail obliterated a low window as the Charizard closed his jaws on her heart sphere, eliciting a blood-curling roar. There were only three things he could think of that were likely to stop the battling Pokémon – well, four, but the odds of a sudden meteor shower were slim – so he started at the top of the list.

He elbowed the Kadabra in the side, ignoring her scandalized expression (physical contact wouldn’t hurt her) and whispered, “I can’t justify property damage. Can you do something about them?”

Her look of response was eloquent: _You don’t have to live with them, moron. You do something about them_. To make her point, she crossed her arms and brought her legs up into a cross-legged position in midair. Her posture said that she would not be moved.

Option number two was currently asleep, and Jed was loathe to wake her up. Not only was the Eevee kit in need of more sleep after her unfortunate period of starvation, her whimpers were among the most headache-inducing of any baby Pokémon he had ever encountered. And that was saying something; he worked at a breeding center.

Putting to the side the possibility of using the cries of the kit to get the attention of the Charizard and Dragonair, Jed squared his shoulders and faced option three. Before he could talk himself out of it, he bellowed, “Hey!” Later, he would swear that his heart stopped briefly when the two Pokémon stopped in place and turned slowly to stare at him, breathing deeply, the Charizard’s fangs still clinking against the Dragonair’s heart sphere and the Dragonair’s tail wrapped tightly three times around the Charizard’s neck.

Clearing his throat and making sure that the kit was prominent in the crook of his arm, Jed frowned. “What do you two think you are doing? This is a business, not a battlefield, and I expect you to _behave_.” Feeling assured enough to take on a more reproachful tone as he noticed that the two Pokémon didn’t look likely to turn on him, the man continued, “Besides, you should be focusing on the welfare of this kit, not whatever quarrel you have going on here; she’s going to need responsible care, and if I don’t think you can handle it, I will make sure she gets it somewhere else.”

That was enough to make the Charizard release the Dragonair, pushing her away and roughly unwinding her tail from his neck. She wasn’t too far behind him, though, quickly withdrawing her tail and retreating to the Kadabra’s side, where the psychic-type disregarded her completely in favor of mediation.

“Better,” Jed sighed, running his free hand over his mohawk. “If you two can keep your fangs out of each other, I have no problem with leaving the kit to you. The Kadabra, at least, seems like a good calming influence.”

The Kadabra opened her eyes, pleased surprise at the compliment clear in them before it faded in favor of a wearied acknowledgement. _Yes_ , she seemed to say. _You’d think so_. The mortified Charizard looked properly chastised and the Dragonair was, if not compliant, then acceptably attentive.

“I’m waiting on a promise, here,” Jed prompted, when no further action was taken. The Charizard nodded immediately, approaching the man with slow steps and holding out his hands for the kit. The Dragonair, too, nodded, and contented herself with shooting the fire-type dirty looks; she then looked directly at Jed, as if to say, _See? I can be mature_. The Kadabra, naturally, ignored him.

Jed nodded, satisfied that the kit would be in safe hands – metaphorically speaking – even if those hands changed from day to day. “All right, then,” he said, suddenly business-like, placing the kit carefully into the Charizard’s palms and then rubbing his hands together. “First things first. The kit is fine, other than having gone without food for her first day or so of life. She’ll recover rapidly with proper care, which I will have to trust you to give her.”

He was answered with another round of nods.

“Good. Now, I gave her the usual spread of antibiotics and preventatives, which should make her immune to basic illnesses during kithood. She’ll still be vulnerable to some things, though, so if she appears to be getting sick, don’t hesitate to seek out a Pokémon Center or another breeding center.

“Now, I am hoping that you will have a supply of fresh water wherever you go. A water-type Pokémon, maybe, or a purifier for river water.” More nods, and this time the Kadabra held up one finger to indicate the first option.

“Excellent. In that case, _this_ bag” – Jed turned around and sifted through the bags and papers on the counter before finally holding up three and pointing to largest – “contains about two hundred packets of dry formula. You pour it into a feeding bottle, which I have supplied for you in _this_ bag, and mix it with enough water to fill the bottle to the highest line. I estimate she’ll drink maybe five or six bottles a day for four weeks or so, so two hundred packets should be plenty.”

At the incredulous looks on all of the Pokémons’ faces, he added, “All mammal newborns are hungry a lot, usually at inconvenient times. I hope you weren’t planning on sleeping much for the next few weeks. Also, I suggest you leave the whole ordeal to those with opposable thumbs, because otherwise the results can range from awkward to dangerous.” Jed gestured to the last bag and said, “This has tablets of baby-strength Potion. It can be harmful to give her the full-strength variety, so please remember to use only this medicine until she’s older. At least month or so after she’s weaned, to be safe.”

The man then went around the counter and ducked behind it for a few moments, rummaging in the lowest drawers. Exhaling triumphantly, he emerged, presenting a long strip of white cloth with light blue stitching along the edges. “I assume you will all be out of your balls and carrying the kit with you; this will make things easier.”

Perhaps it was clear that the Pokémon had no idea what the fabric was, because he went on quickly, “It’s a sling. You slide the kit into this little pocket in the middle and tie the ends of the fabric around your back, keeping her close and your hands free. It’s especially appropriate for your situation because Eevee kits can’t thermoregulate until two to three weeks old, so some Pokémon without fire in his veins or chilly scales is going to have to use the sling to carry her around and keep her temperature within an acceptable range. Since I don’t know the rest of your team, I’m going to have to guess the Kadabra for now.”

The psychic-type gave Jed an affronted stare, probably considering all of the increased bodily contact she would have to endure, but the man’s lips were set into a thin line that would not take no for an answer. Eventually, she waved a hand that was not agreement but was neither refusal, which Jed had to assume meant that she would do it reluctantly.

“Thank you. And _please_ , don’t fly too often, that can’t be good for her.” His voice was sincere and the Kadabra caved, holding out her hand imperiously for the sling. Handing it over and then making a sweeping motion with his hand that seemed to encompass all of the papers strewn on the counter, Jed said, “Finally, what we have here are all of the kit’s test results. Very boring and very standard. The only unusual things about your kit are the color of her eyes, which will be green once they open, instead the typical brown. Also, she has an extra toe on her left hind paw, which I’ve never heard of on an Eevee before, but it shouldn’t be detrimental. That's genetics for you.”

Jed was reduced to gaping at the end of his speech when the Dragonair, who after the small battle had been almost painfully uptight, hit the floor. He quickly paged through his college texts in his head, trying to think of what could make a Dragonair suddenly unable to levitate, and all he could come up with was shock.

* * *

In the end, Kindle had to pick Gale up himself, the length of her body draped over his shoulders and wings, in order to move her outside after her collapse. Initially, Jed panicked, of course – peering into her glassy eyes and prodding the shallow scrapes she had garnered in the fight, looking for any indication of what was wrong with her – but Mirage touched his shoulder lightly and used her psychic power to move him back a few steps. She proceeded to take off Enya’s backpack, pull out the coin purse with long fingers, and hand it to Jed, who stared at it, dumbfounded, for several moments before realizing what it was for.

The man numbly picked out the appropriate amount of money to pay for the supplies and then wedged the purse back into the backpack before slotting the coins into a till built into the marble counter. Nodding approvingly at his actions, Mirage unleashed a very mild Psychic on the sling to tie it over one shoulder and around the opposite side of her waist, like a sash. Picking up her “we are going to leave soon” hints, Kindle began to heave Gale up off of the floor with one hand (the other still cradling the Eevee kit), which proved to be rather challenging.

As Mirage jammed the paper bags into side pockets of Enya’s bag and heaved it back onto her hard brown shoulders, Jed seemed to accept that neither the Charizard nor the Kadabra were going to be overly concerned about the Dragonair’s fall. Sighing and shaking his head, he approached Kindle and lifted the slumbering kit out of his hand; Kindle conceded, with a little consternation, that maybe the man’s hands were indeed a bit too large to handle the kit well. Still, the fire-type bobbed his head at the man gratefully and used the newly freed hand to balance Gale more securely over himself.

Jed carried the Eevee over to Mirage, readjusting the swaddling cloth around the kit before sliding her smoothly into the sling’s pocket, where she hung close to the Kadabra’s chest. The blue stitching on the fabric, suddenly discernible as letters, read _IT’S A BOY!_ in bold cursive; Mirage raised an eyebrow and her whiskers twitched with what the man suspected was amusement. “That was our last one in stock, sorry,” he explained, shrugging. “Supply shipments from the Union have been coming less often than usual and we don’t usually get all we ordered. There’s a formal complaint in the works, but you’ll have to live with this sling.”

And then, with very little ceremony and nothing but a last-minute tucking of a brochure called _Choices, Choices: Raising Your Eevee_ into the backpack’s depths, the Pokémon walked out of the breeding center’s automatic doors and into a somewhat dusky sunset.

They spent a few moments standing there peaceably, figuring that their other teammates would come to them, but then a roar sounded from the right. It was not an aggressive roar, or a frightened one – in fact, it was, if anything, half-hearted – but it was recognizably Zephyr’s, which made Kindle run along the curve of the breeding center, Dragonair on his back and all, to see what was wrong. Two corrals over, he spotted Torrent, Zephyr, Zap, and what appeared to be another Raichu having gentle mock battles in the tall grass of the paddock.

Of course. Empty corrals as far as the eye can see, and Zap still managed to find another Raichu. Kindle hung his head, not really sure what he had been expecting, and hurried over to the corral with Gale and Mirage in tow. Clambering inelegantly over the fence with the long form of the Dragonair on his back jumbling up his wings, and making a mental note to be bitter later about the way in which Mirage just floated over the boards, the Charizard threw himself in the way of the slow-motion Strength Torrent had aimed at Zap.

She took one look at him, the lines of worry embedded in his brow and the way he kept flicking anxious glances in the unknown Raichu’s direction, and rolled her eyes. “No, I did not mate with this very nice, very male Raichu here named Singe. Also, we heard you and Gale fighting and thought about coming to see what was happening, but then decided that it would be more fun, and, honestly, more productive to just play here. I hope you’re ashamed of your behavior.” She silently mouthed some words, ticking things off on her fingers, and seemed satisfied that she had addressed all important points. “Now, what did you do to Gale?”

The Pokémon in question lifted her head, which had been hanging by Kindle’s elbow, and looked around groggily, taking in the scene. She flicked out her tongue a couple of times, a nervous habit harkening back to her days as a Dratini, and murmured in a voice uncharacteristically devoid of invective, “He did not do it. The kit is Enya.”

The male Raichu, Twinge or whatever his name was, had enough time to form the beginning of a question before Zephyr growled fiercely at him to take off and Zap made sharp little shooing motions with her paws. He darted off, half terrified and half reluctant, and disappeared into the breeding center through a small swinging hatch in the wall.

“Wait, Enya’s the kit? Really?” Zap brought the team’s focus back with her question, the edge of incredulity to her voice enough to make Kindle bristle. Zephyr shifted around and began muttering to Torrent in a low voice, his fangs clinking next to the other Pokémon’s ear slits. Mirage floated a few feet away and busied herself gazing at the kit with warm eyes and running a finger through her fur every couple of minutes.

“Of course it’s Enya,” the Charizard grumbled. “Haven’t I been saying that the whole time?”

“Well, it’s not like we pay that close attention to you in the first place,” Zap explained. “And then you go off fighting with Gale and talking about magic and my focus just goes” – she made a whooshing noise and fluttered her fingers above her head like a Venomoth's wings. “Sorry about it.”

Zephyr grunted ambiguously, raising his head from his and Torrent’s whispered discussion, perhaps denouncing Zap’s statement and perhaps agreeing with it. “Conceivably, we would better be capable of understanding this turn of events if Gale would be so benevolent as to reveal to us the reasoning behind her sudden conviction.”

Kindle, suddenly thinking of all of the important veins Gale was close to in her current position, shrugged her off of his shoulders and wings and looped her into several rings on a patch of crabgrass. She had not yet recovered her ability to levitate, but was perfectly lucid, if quiet. “The kit will have green eyes and has an extra toe on her left hind paw.”

“Is that it?” Zap asked, scratching an ear with her own hind paw.

“Please shut up, Zap,” Kindle grumbled softly, moving to the right so that he could tower over her properly. Gale's proof was perfectly valid, thank you very much: Enya’s eye color was the most well-known shade of green in Kanto, and the sixth toe on her left foot was the source of much amusement to her Pokémon, who had never before seen anything like it and had to have genetics explained to them. “I could accidently step on you.”

“I have the type advantage, Scar-izard,” she muttered back. “How’s the wing?” She would never let him forget that she took out Lance’s Dragonite where he had failed, but Kindle just attributed that to type advantage as well. He would take this belief to the grave if he had to.

“Pidgey!” Gale snapped, recovering some of her spite, which was, in a very strange way, a relief to all of her teammates. Her hot red eyes narrowed and she gritted her teeth, managing to rise a foot or so into the air. “Please stop tittering. I am very busy coping with the fact that Kindle was right for once.”

“Don’t you think it could be coincidence?” Zap got out before Kindle stepped on her tail and she hissed and shocked his foot. He gritted his teeth audibly but didn’t lift the appendage.

Torrent, pulling his tail fin closer to his body with unusual paranoia, looked up from where he had been talking in undertones with Zephyr again. “Zeph and I believe you, Gale. Kindle.”

Kindle’s foot lifted in surprise, and Zap, freed, darted over to the Gyarados and Aerodactyl. Standing in front of them, defiant paws on her hips and a scowl on her face, she craned her neck to look them in the eye. “And what, exactly, makes you say that?” she demanded. “Is there a belief virus going around? Am I going to catch it? Will I grow to be twenty feet tall and stupid as a newly hatched Caterpie?”

“Attend me,” Zephyr interrupted before Zap's metaphor could get any more complex. “Our beloved Gale has become, with her impending evolution…how shall I express this appropriately? The words will not arise.”

“A psychotic, self-righteous pain?” Torrent muttered, flinching but looking unapologetic as Gale snarled and gained several more feet of levitation. They should have known, Kindle mused, that anger would give her back her strength.

Flashing a wing in between the enraged Dragonair and the offending Gyarados, Zephyr nodded decisively. “Affirmative. That is one view on the matter. Now, I ask of you: why would Gale prevaricate anything that portrays Kindle positively?

“It just doesn’t make sense; she loathes him,” Torrent put in helpfully.

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Kindle.”

Zephyr struck the Gyarados behind the head with his tail, the arrow-like tip glancing off of the thick blue scales. “Hush now, I was orating,” the Aerodactyl griped, serrated teeth gleaming. Turning back to Zap, who was grudgingly beginning to look convinced, he continued, “I will recapitulate: Gale doesn’t dissemble, especially not to benefit Kindle.”

“Fine, I see your point,” Zap muttered, seeming to deflate. “But I want to know what Mirage has to say about this.”

All eyes turned to the Kadabra, who looked up from the sleeping kit she was cuddling and twitched an ear disinterestedly. She didn’t seem likely to speak without a reason more impressive than _I want to know what you think_ , and Zap scowled menacingly. “Mirage, I will crack all of my joints from here to Pallet Town if you do not open your lightning-cursed mouth and _talk_.” The Raichu lifted one dark-furred hand and popped a knuckle to prove how serious she was about her threat, and Mirage’s fur stood up.

A second joint was cracked and the Kadabra finally spoke, tempered urgency in her even, sotto voce tone. “Don’t. Enough.” Zap sniggered triumphantly and thanked lighting that the Kadabra had such an easily exploited weakness. “The Eevee is Master Enya because her mind’s patterns are the same. Like fingerprints, unique to each individual. The kit can be no one else. I checked while we were waiting for Gale to recover.” The psychic-type sneered at Zap and then shut her mouth resolutely.

“You can do that?” Kindle cried, outraged. “And you didn’t _check before_?”

"It wasn't relevant before."

" _What_?"

"There was no evidence to support you. And reading mind patterns takes a lot of effort, thank you."

"There was _scent_!"

"There was no evidence I cared for."

"I hate you."

Mirage glared at him before dismissively angling her head down, eyes softening as they landed on the kit. One hand went to cradle the slumbering Eevee and the other made a rude gesture at Kindle, though it could just as easily have been directed at Zap, who had resumed cracking her knuckles when she thought Mirage wouldn't notice.

The Charizard sighed heavily, feeling the indignation drain from his body as his conscience prickled impatiently at him to halt the banter and think for a moment, like the grown Pokémon he was, about what to do next. Especially since it looked like no one else would: Zap was scowling at Mirage but really couldn’t be bothered to act on her irritation, since the psychic-type was just as likely to deflect an attack as she was to reflect it back at its perpetrator. Mirage, of course, was fixated entirely on the kit in her sling, with the single-minded focus she usually reserved for meditation. It would seem she had a soft spot for kits, or maybe just Enya; nor was she the only one with such affection, as Torrent and Zephyr were forgoing continuing their discussion in favor of peering over the Kadabra’s shoulder at the Eevee.

And a few feet away, Gale was determinedly disregarding them all and practicing some figure-eights in the air.

Completely typical. They had all relied on Enya to direct them in the past; she was their trainer, after all, and a keen and decisive strategist besides. But she wasn’t there anymore, and it suddenly seemed as though Kindle was going to have to take a step up from second-in-command and take her place.

The Charizard let out a low whine, almost inaudible, and faint curls of smoke rose from his nostrils. Simple orders to look over there or to fight this Pokémon or to leave that person alone were one thing; actually leading this bunch would undoubtedly be a mess. Cinders, he didn’t want to be in charge.

But his unfortunate selfless streak agreed with his conscience, so he found himself standing straighter, his wings flared subtly to complete the straight line of his back. “We should go,” he spoke up, effectively cutting off the cooing noises Torrent was making at Enya, and Zap’s impotent mutters. Gale froze in the middle of her acrobatics, deigning to glare at him. “The longer we stay here, the more likely we are to be seen.”

“And that is bad because…” The Dragonair’s question trailed off mockingly.

“Because we are powerful Pokémon. And recognizable, too. Famous.” The team, even Gale, grimaced at the reminder of the Championship Enya currently held, comprehension dawning. “If anyone sees us and it gets out that Enya Lyle’s Pokémon are running rampant through Kanto, they’ll know she’s missing. We’ll get captured, if not by Pokéballs then by cages, and there will be a massive manhunt for her. I can’t imagine any way that would turn out well.”

“Nor can I,” Zephyr said, his voice unusually deep, a sign of emotion.

Gale’s eyes narrowed dangerously, the tip of her tail beginning to undulate from side to side slowly, like an Ekans’s body before it struck. “So what do you propose, Kindle? _Hide_ from the humans forever? _Never_ try to set Enya to rights?”

“Ooh, that doesn’t sound too good, either,” Zap muttered, but she padded over to Kindle’s side in silent support nevertheless. A wave of gratitude swept over the Charizard – the electric-type seemed to delight in giving him ulcers, but she was also his best friend outside of Enya.

Kindle thought for a moment, feeling the Dragonair’s scarlet gaze boring into him like an assault. “No, I agree,” he said eventually. “We can’t do nothing about her condition. I _propose_ , Gale, that we wait until she is weaned and can walk and talk. We’ll see if she has her memories or if she is truly just an Eevee kit now before doing anything else; it’ll only take a month or so.”

“And then what?” Gale snapped. She was well and truly furious now, more so than she had been in weeks, and Zephyr made a soft shushing noise at her, trying to lessen her rage before someone got attacked or she started summoning a storm with her intrinsic powers as a Dragonair. She responded with an articulate bite to his nose. Thunder rolled in the distance.

“I don’t know yet,” Kindle granted, flinching in anticipation. The wind began to swirl around the quickening movements of the Dragonair’s tail, a faint twister being wrought with her anger. “But we’d have a month to think on it,” he added, placating as much as he could without sounding pathetic.

Beyond words, Gale snarled, and the twister around her tail thickened with power as the sky above darkened. Kindle’s tail flame palpitated in the wind, and Mirage casually conjured a blue-tinged psychic shield around herself and Enya.

“Wait!” Torrent called, waving his tail amid the huddled group to bring attention to himself. A small portion of Kindle’s mind noted a dark burn on his fin and automatically added a bullet point to his mental ‘things to talk to Zap about’ list. “I have an idea.” Torrent's voice was hard and sharp like was normal for a Gyarados, but at a higher pitch than one would expect; it cut through the rumble of the impending squall and the low babble of voices. When he was satisfied that he had everyone’s eyes – Gale’s twister wavered with her movements and quickly faded as her distraction grew – he continued. “Now, I don’t remember much from when I was a Magikarp…”

“You were useless,” Zap supplied helpfully, leaning on Kindle’s foot.

“…but I do remember that fellow, Professor Oak, who Enya is so fond of. She visited him a lot in his lab in those early days. Seemed like he knew a lot about everything, was up-to-date on Team Rocket, and spent most of his time in the company of Pokémon, so I bet he would try to understand us and what we need before locking us up.”

“Good idea, Torrent,” Kindle exclaimed, his eyes lighting up; it did seem like the perfect solution, and perfectly timed no less. Gale’s fury was abating sluggishly – even she couldn’t deny the validity of Torrent’s plan – and the Charizard breathed a slight sigh of relief as the wind died down. “Pallet Town it is, once Enya is weaned. Are you…are we all right now, Gale?” he asked tentatively.

Kindle could not even muster up surprise when the Dragonair gave one last bitter hiss and a streak of lightning burst from the still cloudy sky and struck him in the back, singing the delicate flesh of his wings. All he felt was pained resignation, and then he felt remarkably little.


	5. Start Here

 "Start here & go until you die, he said. What's so complicated about that?”

* * *

When Kindle woke, it was the sort of luminous dark the world would wrap itself in at night when the moon was full and the stars were smattered liberally across the sky; he was lying on the ground, on his stomach in a makeshift nest of tree branches and heather. His eyes opened reluctantly, blinking a couple of times before gnarled trees came into focus in front of him, smeared with lichen and gouged deep with the claw marks of some large Pokémon. Turning his head to the other side, not daring to get up just yet – this was not the first time Gale’s temper had gotten him hurt, and movement was always restricted afterwards until he was healed – he met the gaze of Zap, who was idly nibbling on a berry and eying him from where she lay on the trunk of an uprooted tree.

“Welcome back to being conscious,” the Raichu said, tossing the pit of the fruit over her shoulder and sitting up.

“How long?” Kindle asked, his voice hoarse, seeming to catch on brambles in his throat.

“Were you out?” Zap clarified. She hopped from the trunk and approached the Charizard’s head, peering into his eyes with worry in her own. “A little over a day now; we didn’t have any Revives. She got you good this time.”

Kindle grunted, clearing his throat. “Well, there was that time she got me stuck in a blizzard. My wings had frostbite.”

Zap grabbed one of his horns roughly and gave it a brusque little shake; he whined at the sharp jab of pain that shot through his head with the motion. The Raichu pointed towards his feet and growled, “Your tail flame did not almost go out in the blizzard.”

Slowly, tiredly, the Charizard raised his head and twisted his neck to look at his tail. Its tip was propped up in cradle of a Y-shaped stick shoved into the earth between his feet, presumably to keep his flame from setting the forest on fire. But in honesty there wasn’t too much flame to be worried about: just a few licks of writhing orange and red every so often and a soft glow that spoke of dying heat around embers.

“Huh. She must have been really angry this time.”

“A slight under exaggeration, but I think you may be concussed so I’ll let it slide.” Zap left Kindle’s side and scampered back to the fallen tree, vaulting over it and seizing something from the other side of the trunk before returning to him. “Some days,” she muttered as she held out what she had retrieved, a small Hyper Potion squeeze bottle, “the only thing that keeps me going is imagining the look of horror on her face when she finally evolves and becomes the sickeningly loving Gale we used to know.”

Kindle groaned, a keening deep in his throat, shoving his hands underneath his stomach and levering himself up. His claws bit into the soft earth and he gave one last weary shove, rolling onto his hip. Now that the Charizard was conscious, he could render his tail flame harmless and did so with a quiet thought – he could never explain to a non-fire-type how he did this, but it was as voluntary and simple as clenching his fist – as he sat up completely. His muscles protested, sore as cinders after the lightning strike; he slumped back against a tree, spine bent, limbs lax, neck curved down almost to his chest.

Zap forced the Hyper Potion into Kindle’s hand, closing his fingers around it by jamming his claws together with her tiny paws. He stared at it blankly for a few seconds before snapping the lid and spray mechanism off with a practiced yank of his wrist. “They should really flavor these,” he grimaced, tipping his head back and pouring the medicine into his mouth.

“Tell it to the Potion makers,” Zap quietly laughed. “Torrent may be the only one who had to drink more of those things than me when we were young.”

“No kidding.” Abruptly, he clenched his teeth and grunted through them inarticulately; his back arched and his eyes widened as a wave of energy surged through his body. A ripple of sorts flowed down the back of his wings as the medicine healed the electricity burns there. His tail flame flared wildly with vitality before the power of the Hyper Potion faded and he could regain control of himself. His next words were a strained, breathless laugh: “As much fun as you make of Torrent, you were pretty useless as a Pikachu.”

Zap scowled. “I had a low Defense, all right? I won battles for Enya just as much as you did, Scarizard.”

Kindle grinned at her defensiveness and stood up, reveling in the lack of pain he felt. Stretching languidly, he half-heartedly tossed the empty Hyper Potion bottle at the Raichu, who caught it deftly and threw it right back at him; it hit his taut stomach and rebounded back at her, clipping her ear with a solid thwack.

Zap’s swearing was loud and creative as she rubbed her ear grumpily, and she looked between the bottle and Kindle several times, not entirely sure which one she should glare at first. Kindle won.

“Don’t give me that look,” he chuckled, waving a hand at her dismissively. “You threw it.”

“I hate you.”

The Charizard laughed outright at this, flaring his wings and flapping them slowly; his actions were a sign of friendly trust among Pokémon, in that he was giving Zap a perfect target with his widespread wings and trusting her to not attack. “Where is everyone?” he asked as his laughter abated.

“Hunting,” Zap replied shortly. “I’m here because I’m the only one who will eat Enya’s strange little food bars and someone needed to babysit your unconscious tail.”

Kindle inhaled, his relaxed form tightening perceptibly, muscles standing out on his forearms and neck. “Oh, tell me Enya’s not with them,” he said, a mixture between a snarl and a whine.

“Of course she is, we're delinquent and have no idea how to take care of children.”

“All _right_ , you sarcastic rodent,” Kindle snorted, relief in his voice. “I was just being cautious.”

“Don't worry, Mirage is too protective. And herbivorous. She’s up a tree with the kit, stuffing her face with berries.”

“What a comfort.” Kindle tried to picture the Kadabra eating any way but daintily and failing. “You said it’s been a little over a day, right? Has Enya been fed regularly?” As he spoke, he stooped down and picked up the Hyper Potion bottle and its lid from the natural debris of the forest floor, and shook the empty plastic container threateningly at Zap.

The Raichu leaped up with the considerable strength of her hind legs and snatched the medicine bottle from Kindle’s hand, landing gracefully at his side. “As if she'd let us forget. Every four hours, like clockwork, she starts to wail at us all until we give her some formula.” The electric-type’s irritated tone would have been more convincing if it hadn’t been for how her voice turned soft and indulgent at the mention of her trainer’s name.

Now that he was standing, Kindle could see Enya’s canvas sack behind the fallen tree, and was unsurprised when Zap retraced her steps to put the Hyper Potion bottle back into the bag. It wasn’t like there was much room to spare for trash, but plastic was one of those materials that couldn’t be burnt properly and wouldn’t degrade.

“Will you take me to her?” he asked, following her and stepping onto the log, flaring his wings for balance as his talons sank into the soft wood.

Zap simply pointed to the bag impetuously until Kindle picked it up in one large hand. Satisfied with his compliance, she shrugged. “To whom? Mirage or Enya?”

The Charizard nudged her roughly in the ribs with his foot. “I’m assuming that that makes no difference.”

“Ah, but you know what they say happens when you assume. You make an ass out of you…” Zap trailed off, slapping the fire-type’s foot and flaring her nostrils widely, testing the air for Mirage’s scent.

“…and me,” Kindle finished for her.

“I already said you.” Ducking a quick swipe of Kindle’s claws, the Raichu added, “This way,” darting off in the shadowed space between two tree trunks.

Kindle wasn’t sure what rankled more: the quip or the fact that he relied so heavily on Zap’s sense of smell. His nose might have been unparalleled in differentiating many smells in close quarters, but hers was far superior in tracking scents at a distance. She could lead him straight to Mirage (and Enya); he’d be just as likely to end up back at the breeding center.

Snarling quietly to himself, the Charizard hastily followed her through the trees, watching the yellow lightning shape of her tail bob as she walked ahead.

They walked on for a while, Zap refusing to ride on Kindle’s back even though he offered twice after seeing that one of her front paws was bothering her. “I just rolled my wrist when Torrent knocked me off his head,” she explained sullenly. “It’s embarrassing; normally, it wouldn’t be a problem, but he just caught me off-guard and I landed funny.”

A memory struck, and Kindle narrowed his eyes, lengthening his stride to come up alongside and gaze down at her. “That wouldn’t have anything to with the huge burn he’s got on his tail now, would it?”

Zap sniffed the air rapidly and nudged Kindle in the leg, moving him a bit to the right as he walked. Considering his question after another moment, she sniffed again, this time in disdain. “If I refrain from commenting, is that like being not guilty?”

“That’s a yes, then.”

Zap frowned at him, raising herself up onto her hind legs in order to walk bipedal; this method of travel was slower than her normal one but got Kindle to stop looking at her with such concern. “You know what they say, though. If you play with an easily irritated electric-type, you’re going to get an electricity burn you will never forget.”

A snicker escaped Kindle before he could stop it. “I don’t think that’s exactly…” A peculiar feeling of unease came over him suddenly; a feeling that something was vaguely wrong, something was missing. Figuring he’d never wrest a clear confession out of Zap, much less an apology, he abandoned the current conversation to focus on the cause of his disquiet. It came to him after a few moments more of walking.

“Where’s my ball?” he asked, halting in his tracks. A hand snapped to his chest but clasped nothing – the odd feeling was the lack of Pokéball and chain bouncing against his breastbone as he took each lumbering step. Little was worse for a captured Pokémon than not knowing where his ball was; whoever possessed his ball possessed him.

Zap laughed outright at the slight panic on the Charizard’s face; a colony of Zubat, disturbed, rose from a nearby tree in a thick stream of leathery wings and dark shrieks. “Calm your flame, lightning-brain. We had to use it to get you away from the breeding center because no one wanted to lug your heavy carcass around. It’s in the bag.”

"I could really do without the mockery,” Kindle muttered, stifling a relieved sigh; finding a relatively clear patch of earth, he gently set Enya’s bag down and fumbled with the drawstrings. Groaning impatiently, Zap padded over and batted the fire-type’s fearsome claws away before loosening the strings with her nimble fingers. She reached into the bag, her little arm almost disappearing into its depths, and with some exasperation pulled out a silver chain and the minimized Pokéball.

The Raichu tossed the necklace up like one of the plastic hoops people would throw onto a Rapidash’s horn as a game in traveling carnivals. The chain framed the moon briefly, glinting dully in the pale light as Kindle thrust his head up, nose pointed and horns pressed flush against the long line of his neck. The necklace, finding itself prey to gravity, fell neatly over his muzzle, past his horns, and down his nape, and settled at the base of his long orange neck. The Charizard reached back and grabbed his tail, pulling it toward his chest to verify to his still slightly anxious mind that his Pokéball was, indeed, safe.

The fire symbol etched onto the sphere was thrown into relief by his tail flame, and for a moment, between the warm fiery glow and the moon and stars’ radiance, the chain seemed to be made more of light than of metal.

And then the moment passed, and Zap tapped her hind paw on the ground irritably, and Kindle picked Enya’s bag back up, finding it simpler to just carry it in his hand than to maneuver it onto a shoulder.

“If you are quite done panicking,” the Raichu said, business-like, “we should continue on. Mirage’s scent is getting close, and I don’t know what’s stronger – Enya or her formula.”

“What does it smell like?” Kindle, finally satisfied with the condition of his Pokéball, asked. He released his tail and it swung out behind him, swaying as he walked.

Zap shrugged; one ear twitched disinterestedly. “Milk. Once Torrent adds water to the powder, you really can’t tell a difference between milk and the formula.” She inhaled deeply and angled herself a bit further left.

Kindle liked the sound of that, but the remark about his Gyarados teammate raised some questions, not to mention some interesting mental images. “How’s he doing with that? I bet he’s not used to having to tone down his water flow.”

The Raichu sniggered briefly, and whispered as if telling a secret, “Well, he almost broke the bottle a couple of times…”

“I’m sure the glass is very fragile,” Kindle said, defending the absent Torrent instinctively.

“Which would be an excellent argument if the bottle were made of glass,” Zap agreed with a smirk. “But, my dearest Kindle, it is made of plastic. Very stout plastic designed to withstand baby elemental Pokémon going wild around it.”

The Charizard winced and shook his head even as he ducked under a tree branch. “He must be mortified.”

“Absolutely. It was like watching him struggle to use Bubble or something, which was hilarious, but he did get the hang of it after a bit. It was fun while it lasted.”

“Sometimes I forget how mean you are.”

“Eh, on the scale of meanness, I'm pretty tame,” Zap dismissed. “Especially compared to Gale. You should have heard her when Torrent was still figuring out how to let a little water out at a time. She’s actually been pretty protective of the kit ever since she violently knocked you unconscious with the sheer force of her rage.”

“There was also a twister and some lightning,” Kindle felt obligated to point out.

“But mostly her rage.” Zap didn’t bother sounding smug; she was right and they both knew it. Dark furred ears suddenly flicking upwards, her nose twitching, the Raichu halted and placed one paw on of the fire-type’s knee. “Okay, Mirage is really close now. Up there,” she added, pointing to the upper boughs of some large tree. Kindle could never remember the names of the trees themselves, nor of their berries; all he knew was which fruits were good to eat and which were poison.

This was one with broad leaves and small purple berries that were sweet and tough, very filling. Stepping up under the lowest boughs, the Charizard craned his neck up and peered myopically into the deep shadows of the dense, high branches laden with clusters of leaves and fruit. His night vision was not the best (which wasn’t usually a problem, given his tail flame) but maneuvering his tail into a useful position proved incredibly awkward, so he gestured for Zap to join him.

She padded over and perched herself on his foot, looking upwards and scowling. “Lightning-cursed tree,” she muttered. “All I can see is a bit of gold. Probably her leg or something. Hold on a second,” she added, squinting in concentration.

Suddenly, the Raichu became as radiant as the moon itself – more so, since according to a book Enya had once read to her team the moon’s light was merely a reflection of the sun’s, and Zap’s light was born entirely of herself. Her Flash was half-hearted at first, allowing their eyes to adjust to the brightness, but soon it had a twenty-foot radius about them glowing like midday.

They both gazed back up into the tree’s heights now that everything was so illuminated, and Kindle’s jaw fell open in silent surprise.

“I don’t believe it!” Zap gasped. “She’s asleep!”

Kindle picked the little electric-type up, claws carefully encircling her middle, and tossed her into the tree; she landed solidly on a branch a several feet below the slumbering Mirage. “About time, too,” he said, watching Zap nimbly scale the rest of the distance up to the Kadabra. “How long did she stay awake this time?”

Mirage didn’t require much sleep – not many psychic-types did, other than Abra – something in which she took no small amount of pride. But when she reached her limits, which usually came after a couple of weeks, she crashed, even if she was high in a tree with a kit slung on her chest and a Raichu using Flash crouched warily in front of her.

Zap reached out toward Mirage, her paw encountering an invisible wall of resistance. Thin, wavering blue tendrils extended from beneath her palm like ripples on a pool of water and outlined a sphere that encircled the Kadabra even in sleep.

Nodding approvingly, the Raichu sprang down, hopping from branch to branch and then onto Kindle’s head. He was accustomed to her weight and her tendency to use his head as a landing pad, and so bent his neck with her momentum to make the touchdown gentler on her injured paw

Zap regained her balance and then stretched out on her stomach, her tail trailing down the Charizard’s neck and her hindquarters snug in between his horns, and played with the pebbled, smoke-stained skin at the tip of his nose. “I think she’s been awake for sixteen days - I remember she slept the night before Enya took us to see that horror movie about the Marowak spirit. So she’s really out for the count, but her shield is strong. Enya’s fine, too, and we fed her about an hour ago so she’ll sleep for a while longer.”

Kindle blinked – cinders, that was still odd. Enya was an Eevee kit.

His trainer, the girl with hair the color of chocolate and eyes as green as new leaves, who loved to read even though books were too heavy to carry around on her travels, who didn’t have a tactful bone in her body, who could get lost in her own house. The girl who never once lost a match, who took the time to play charades with her Pokémon until she could guess their birth-names, who was on a first-name basis with every Nurse Joy this side of Scarlet City. Enya, a Pokémon Master and the reigning Kanto Champion, and his best friend.

Was an Eevee kit who may not even remember him.

And suddenly Kindle wasn’t so sure he wanted the kit weaned anytime soon. As long as she was a newborn, he could pretend that she was his Enya, too.

* * *

For humans, a month was an almost interminably long time to wait for anything. It was simple matter of perception, really; humans had so much available to them that simply not to _do_ for long periods of time was almost unheard of. They had lived long enough in civilization that merely being alive had lost its thrill.

Pokémon, on the other hand, were still survivalists, still wild enough. Hours spent only hunting and sleeping and playing and running from predators were never far removed from their minds, even when captured and trained, so Kindle and the rest of his team found the days blurring together peacefully as they waited for Enya to grow up.

And grow she did; she fed prodigiously and gained about a quarter pound every week. Strapped to Mirage’s chest (Zap had offered, but the sling was laughably large on her), she mostly slept, waking up only to demand her bottle and then falling back into slumber. Dexter assured them that this was normal.

Her eyes opened after thirteen days, and true to Jed’s word, they were brilliant green, Enya’s green. She looked everywhere, rolling about in her sling restlessly to take in every view; she was particularly fascinated by Kindle’s tail flame and Gale’s heart sphere. She began lifting her large, heavy ears up whenever Pokémon were talking around her, and mimicking in a high, halting stutter the sounds she heard. The language of Pokémon was all about the inflection of the speech, however, so her attempts to say the word _Gyarados_ in the Eevee tongue only led to an inadvertent bout of foul cursing. Zap couldn't stop laughing for two days.

After twenty days, the kit’s fur began to darken, slowly turning a pleasant woodsy brown except on the ruff of her chest and neck and tail, which remained white as it had been when Kindle found her. Her teeth came in rapidly, seeming to erupt from her gums, which proved a nuisance since the kit found that she liked trying her new fangs out on tails and paws when they came too close to her. This development did help her language skills, though, making it easier for her to form words that were increasingly coherent.

Before long, Enya crossed the line from being restless to being absolutely miserable in the sling, probably a joint result of being able to thermoregulate for herself, her strengthening muscles, and her natural curiosity. After a day of her nonstop whining, a mixture of desperate whimpers and her handful of mastered words (“Want! No! Down! No!”), she was let loose and she wandered – under watchful eyes – learning how to control her limbs and exploring the delights of the forest. She nevertheless tended to stay near either Kindle or Gale; it galled both to no end that Enya also liked the other.

Toward the end of the allotted month – Kindle tried not to think too hard about the fact that the kit, though similar in personality to his trainer, was clearly not her – Enya was allowed to take a share of the hunt Zephyr had brought back. She seemed to have no compunction with eating the meat of a Nidorina despite having met and gotten along quite well with one as she explored, and the team as a whole was relieved that she did not have that particular human hang-up.

Zap, whom Enya called Aunt Zap at the urging of an amused Torrent, quickly realized that the kit was a fighter despite her size, just as she had been as a human. Only now, she had teeth and claws in addition to her propensity for combat. So, though both Kindle and Gale had in a rare moment of agreement forbidden battle training until Enya was old enough to know what she was getting into, the Raichu snuck her away every so often to give her advice on Pokémon battles, such as it was.

“You never let anything knock you off your paws, understand? Your back does not hit the ground in a battle, ever, unless you’re doing it on purpose.”

“I like shoving my tail or my ears at my opponent’s face, because then they can’t see and I get free range with my claws.”

“Listen, you ever see a ghost-type or something that looks like it might be a ghost-type, don’t attack. Your moves are what? Tackle, Sand Attack, Tail Whip? Normal moves like yours go right through.”

“I don’t care what you’re fighting, I don’t care if it’s a friendly fight or a death brawl – if your opponent has a groin, you go for it.”

Zap would then let Enya get a taste of competition by running with her in little races; the electric-type did not, of course, run to win these sprints, but every time the kit finished a lap the electric-type found that she didn’t have to try quite so hard to come in second place.  The Raichu also taught the Eevee how to navigate trees, leaping from branch to branch like a Mankey and using her claws to hold onto the wood securely. It was an important skill to have, Zap reasoned, since the ground was not always the safest place; Kindle could hardly accuse her of training the kit. Per se.

Torrent (dubbed Uncle Torrent by Enya when a retaliatory Zap suggested it) got wind of these activities after a couple of days and began his own Not Training. He started by teaching the kit to swim in a lovely deep river he had discovered, which conveniently helped her muscles develop and her coordination improve – he had her hop onto his head and then slowly lowered it underwater until she learned to paddle her legs and keep herself afloat.

After a few days of messily churning her limbs to remain on the surface, Enya nearly gave Torrent a coronary by holding her breath and ducking fully into the water as she swam. The Gyarados tried to discourage her from this – all he had wanted was for her not to drown if she ever fell into water – but the kit’s glee at underwater swimming was more powerful than the arguments of an enormous serpent Pokémon whose mouth alone was fifty times her size.

So Torrent decided that if she was going to take swimming to another level, then he would ensure that she was the best at it. He started to ambush her from below, brushing against her paws with his head ridges so that she would know she’d been attacked: “Try not to let me touch you – and if I can’t see you or sense you, then I can’t very well land a blow, can I?” She worked toward this goal with single-minded intensity for a few days, and the Gyarados supposed he shouldn't have been surprised when she became unnervingly good at swimming quickly and quietly.  One time, he actually lost track of her, and she gloated for hours.

Mirage, after informing Enya to never ever call her anything but just _Mirage_ at the risk of losing all of her fur, then horned in on the Not Training the kit was undergoing, even sparing a few extra words for her as she sat at the psychic-type’s feet, waiting less than patiently for whatever wisdom the Kadabra wished to impart. “Slow down, child,” she said as the Eevee fidgeted with her paws. “Think for a moment before you act. You have a brain, so use it.”

If the kit sat still long enough – something at which she improved slightly with the practice – Mirage would give her a vision with which she could interact. Sometimes it was of a human game the Kadabra called Checkers, which involved hopping circular pieces from square to square like Aunt Zap jumping on tree branches, and sometimes it was of a map that showed the forest and groups of Pokémon living in it that needed to maneuver around each other without starting territory or prey feuds. Her favorite vision was one in which she could dictate a Pokémon battle as though she were the trainer.

Mirage, though she would never say it out loud as she made a point of rarely saying anything out loud, was impressed with Enya – she was a good strategist already, just as her human self had been, and was far calmer and more willing to learn than any other child the psychic-type had seen.

It seemed there was nothing they could ask of Enya that she couldn’t perform.

Grandfather Zephyr, as the Aerodactyl had asked the Eevee to call him lest his teammates come up with something more embarrassing, saw the Not Training that the kit was thoroughly enjoying and thought that it was actually far more strenuous than any Real Training he’d ever seen a Pokémon as young as Enya go through. So he decided that instead of Not Training her further, he would provide her with time to relax.

He took her flying on his back, and she took to it even faster than she did to swimming. Sinking her claws into the leathery skin at the base of his skull, she was elated by the wind in her fur and the new smells it brought to her sensitive nose.

“What is that, Grandfather Zeph?” Enya asked one day, clambering higher on the Aerodactyl’s head and crouching low. “That over there…the…the big thing with the white stuff on top?”

“That,” Zephyr responded softly, knowing that the deep vibrations of his voice would travel through his skull and disturb the kit if he spoke too loudly, “is a mountain.”

“Mountain,” she repeated wonderingly in her high, clear voice.

“A mountain is a large peak of the surface of the earth,” Zephyr explained. He had found himself lately having to search his sizable vocabulary for simpler words so that every answer he gave wasn’t followed by another question from the kit. “They say,” he continued, “that long ago, Aerodactyl like me were far more numerous – there were more of us – than they are now, and they were much bigger than I am, and they were only of the flying type.

“Some of these ancient – from a time long ago – Aerodactyl were tricked by an evil Ninetales into bathing in a pool of water that turned them to stone, and their bodies became the mountains of today. That is why all Aerodactyl are now part rock-type and fear the water.”

Enya, as it turned out, liked stories, almost as much as she liked flying, and Zephyr was more than happy to supply both.

Now, Kindle was not stupid. He knew that his teammates were all taking turns passing Enya around to give her advice or practice in combat, but he figured that if the Eevee Enya was at all like the human one – and she was, really, quite similar but for memories and form – then battling was in her blood. Stopping his team would only delay the inevitable.

Besides, he had a larger issue with which to contend: since Enya liked both him and Gale so much, he and the Dragonair had been spending a significant amount of time together over the past month. He could tolerate the dragon-type’s presence again, having found that (deep, deep, deep within) she still harbored her old personality, and she was well on her way to not loathing him anymore, which was nice.

What Kindle was struggling the most with, however, was what Enya insisted on calling him and Gale.

 _Father and Mother_.


	6. Wake Up

“There are moments when I'm completely at peace, but it's usually before my children wake up & they'll have none of that”

* * *

Morning dawned warm and clear and found Enya far too excited to appreciate it. The day for which she had been so eagerly waiting had at last arrived – Father had been promising for a week that they would begin to travel the day after the full moon. She was snuggled underneath one of his wings as he lay on his side, soft pulses of heat from the veins in his wing periodically trailing over her curled up body. He was a light sleeper, Father, and she didn’t want to wake him up too early, but every nerve in the Eevee kit was thrumming with excitement.

Imagine! She was going to see the world. More than just this section of forest, more than even the whole forest, she was going to see all of the places Aunt Zap and Grandfather Zephyr had told her about! Places like Mount Moon, which was full of rare Pokémon like Clefairy, who she so wanted to meet; and Saffron City, which she was told was like a forest with smooth rocks instead of dirt, and trees that seemed to brush at the sky but weren’t really trees because they were made of something else and were called buildings and humans lived inside of them. ("You know what? Never mind. Lightning strike me, that was a terrible metaphor.")

Enya most especially wanted to meet a human.

The thought of even seeing one – a tall, furless, flat-faced, two-legged human who wore extra pelts called clothing and captured Pokémon for battling inside of Pokéballs like the one Father wore around his neck – made her patience snap. She surged to her paws, arching her back against the weight of Father’s wing and bolting out from underneath it to stand on his neck.

“Father!” she whispered. “Father, wake up!”

The Charizard cracked one eye open, gazing drowsily over at the kit. “I’m awake, Enya. Have been. You wiggle a lot when you’re pretending to sleep.”

She winced, hopping from his neck to the ground and sitting by his snout sedately. “Sorry, Father.” Her ears drooped and she looked at her paws for a few moments, shuffling them uncomfortably. Father waited, patient, with a small smile gracing his lips; the Eevee managed to look repentant for a bit longer and then burst out, “But Father! We’re going today. You said! We’re going to fly and I’m going to ride on your back and we’re going to see lots of different Pokémon and we might even see a human!”

“That’s today, huh?” Father asked dryly, rolling onto his stomach and cushioning his head on his hands. “Are you sure?”

“You said!” Enya gasped, ears flying up and fur bristling. All contrition forgotten, she scrambled forward and braced her front paws against the bridge of the fire-type’s nose. Glaring into his quietly amused eyes, she pouted angrily, “You promised!”

“For lightning’s sake, stop teasing her,” a disgruntled voice snarled from behind Father. Recognizing the voice and seizing onto the hope that the speaker would help her make Father see reason, Enya pushed off of his nose and ran toward Aunt Zap, tripping over her own paws in her frenzied dash. The Raichu was curled up in the curve of the Charizard’s tail and didn’t seem too inclined to get up, much less argue with Father, but the kit was desperate.

“Aunt Zap, he promised!” she wailed, skidding to a stop in front of the electric-type.

“I know,” she responded without opening her eyes.

“So that means that he has to do it, right?” Enya urged with every bit of childlike righteousness she possessed. “You can’t promise something and then not do it. It’s…that’s…like breaking the rules, and you can’t do that.”

Aunt Zap reached out, eyes still shut tightly, and pinched the orange tail next to her, hard. “You heard her, Kindle,” she said over the Charizard’s quiet hiss of pain. “You don’t want to break the rules, do you?”

“I suppose not,” he sighed, beleaguered, forcing himself to his feet and bowling the Raichu over with his tail. Turning around and smirking widely, he made a surprised noise. “Oh, I’m sorry, Zap. Pure accident. Shall I help you up?”

“Do you value your hands?”

Satisfied that Aunt Zap would not let Father go back on his word, Enya turned to a slightly more pressing matter. “Father, when will we leave? Now? Can we leave now?”

“Enya, the sun isn’t even all the way above the horizon. Hold your Tauros and give the rest of us a few minutes to wake up.”

In Enya’s mind, this translated roughly to “Please help us wake up.” She sprinted away from Father to the large blue and grey pile that was Uncle Torrent and Grandfather Zephyr, who were both heavy sleepers. The Gyarados was coiled sloppily with the Aerodactyl lying on top of him; the first actually closed his mouth in sleep, while the other snored loudly. Not confident enough to try to leap onto Uncle Torrent’s head from the ground, Enya instead made her way up his tail: past the dark spot on his fin that she wasn’t supposed to touch, circling up his spine and dodging Grandfather Zephyr’s wings and talons, and scrabbling up the chinks in his scales until she stood triumphantly on his head crest.

Fearlessly, she pried open one of the Gyarados’s eyelids with her little paw, swishing her tail. “Uncle Torrent, you have to get up,” she explained firmly to the bleary purple eye as it rolled back. “We’re leaving.” She turned and bounded from this higher vantage point onto the Aerodactyl’s bony back, kneading it briefly with her paws before approaching his head as well. She toyed with the little patches of scar tissue that had accumulated from her sinking her claws in for balance as he flew and leaned toward one of his ear slits. “You, too, Grandfather Zeph!” The rock-type’s snored stuttered to a halt and he groaned wearily. “We all are going to go, and we’re going to see all kinds of things.”

Contorting awkwardly, Grandfather Zephyr grabbed Enya by the scruff of her neck with the little finger-claws on his wing. He lifted her as easily as a human would a pebble and stretched his wings out; Enya shrieked happily and writhed in the Aerodactyl’s grip until he set her down on the ground with a yawn.

Uncle Torrent shifted and tightened himself into a neater coil, a roiling mass of gleaming blue and sinewy muscle. The rock-type on his spine was bucked off with the skitter of claws down scales; Enya squeaked at the incoming bulk of leathery grey skin and stumbled backwards frantically, panic racing through her veins even as her heart seemed to stop beating.

The next thing she knew, she was enwrapped in something smooth and cool that lifted her off of her clumsy paws; only her ears and tail were uncovered, and they were flattened by the wind as she was ushered quickly away.

Mother’s tail unwound from about Enya’s body and placed her gently on the ground; the Dragonair looked the kit over briefly, assuring herself that no harm had been done, and then sped back over to a sheepish-looking Uncle Torrent and a mortified Grandfather Zephyr. As Mother began to give the two of them a thorough piece of her mind (“Are either of you morons familiar with the term ‘apoplectic?’ Because that is what I am right now. If I could get away with it, I would remove your twisters-cursed genitals with my teeth and then leave them out for rabid Growlithe to dine on.”), Enya’s pulse slowly evened out.

She wasn’t entirely sure what genitals were, but Mother’s protective anger soothed her jumpy nerves, as did Father returning with Mirage on his heels and scooping her up to his chest, nuzzling her fur comfortingly while he listened to Mother’s tirade. The Kadabra had the human bag strapped to her back and looked as though she hadn’t slept a bit even though it was about time for her to do so.

The Charizard the proceeded to obliterate any of Enya’s remaining tension with the quiet words, “Are you still okay to fly today?”

“Yesyesyesyes!” She sprang out of his hands and knocked her own breath away by landing on her stomach over Father’s shoulder; wheezing, she clambered further over and swung herself into a comfortable place at the base of his neck as he hunched over slightly, digging her claws into the orange-red skin and feeling secure as a baby Kangaskhan in its mother’s pouch.

She wanted to meet a Kangaskhan – Aunt Zap said that they were pretty common at a human place called the Safari Zone in Fuchsia City.

“Father?”

“Yes? Stop wiggling your claws around; it tickles.”

“Can we go to Fuchsia City and the Safari Zone?”

Father groaned, watching Mother’s rant come to a close with a scathing overview of Uncle Torrent and Grandfather Zephyrs’ apparently dubious heritage. “We have places we need to go, Enya. It’s very urgent.”

Enya was not above pleading or using her large green eyes to her advantage. “Please, Father?”

He turned to her but couldn't hold her gaze for long. “I’ll think about it.”

* * *

If riding on Grandfather Zephyr had been amazing, riding on Father was simply a dream – Father’s bones did not creak every time he flapped his wings, he was delightfully warm, and, best of all, it was so very easy to balance on him. While the Aerodactyl’s back was knobby with his jutting spine and undulated as he flew, the Charizard’s was smooth and steady throughout every wing stroke. There was a small hollow at the base of his neck that the kit could crouch in, her claws finding easy purchase in the loose skin there, and stick her head above the curve where his neck met his shoulder.

It was a whole new experience, and it almost distracted Enya from her excitement about the beginning of an adventure. Almost.

“Calm down, Enya,” Father admonished gently. “I swear, you’re a Magikarp, the way you bounce around so much.” His wings pumped powerfully and raised him and his passenger just enough to avoid a blast of water that shot under his feet.

Maneuvering herself to see the water droplets beneath her fall in a hazy rainbow-like glitter, Enya frowned at the Charizard. “I’m not a Magikarp, Father! I’m an Eevee,” she protested, stilling her bouncing paws nevertheless and settling back into the shallow dip between the fire-type’s shoulders. She turned her head, ears flapping in the breeze, and called back to the Gyarados at the tail end of the flying formation, “You missed, Uncle Torrent!”

“I’ll do better next time!” was his response before Mother snarled and snapped at his sensitive barbels. “When you’re not on Kindle’s back, that is,” he amended hastily, shying away from the Dragonair’s gleaming fangs. “That’s when I’ll get him.”

Father’s wing beats slowed briefly, returning him to the same altitude as his teammates. “Are you doing all right, Enya?” he asked, drawing her attention back to him. “Not having any trouble staying on, are you? You don't need to go back in your sling?”

"No!" she exclaimed, maybe too quickly – even if she hadn't been having the ride of her life, she would have said anything to avoid having to lay in that horrible sling anymore. Composing herself to be a bit more convincing, she shook her head proudly, thinking of all of the times she had flown with Grandfather Zephyr, times that the Aerodactyl told her were their little secrets that Father should never hear about. “Not at all!” she said firmly without any further elaboration, though she longed to tell the Charizard about how she fell only two times before mastering how to balance on a flying Pokémon’s back.

“You’re doing very well, you know. Anyone would think that this isn’t your first time,” he commended her. “Isn’t that right, Zeph?” he called back over his shoulder. “She’s a natural at this flying thing!”

Grandfather Zephyr put on his carefully neutral and conveniently deaf face, and Enya butted Father’s neck with her head until he looked at her. “Mirage says that everyone’s got to have at least one talent,” she said seriously. “Maybe mine’s balancing on things.”

Father laughed and eyed her warmly. “I’m sure you have far greater talents than that,” he assured her before getting an uncomfortable look on his face and straightening his neck to gaze ahead. “There was someone I knew once who had so many talents you thought her body could never contain them all. I have a feeling that you’re a lot like her.”

Enya was so relieved to have distracted Father from her unusual skill that it never crossed her mind to ask him who he was talking about.

The team flew on in silence for quite a while, landing only to relieve themselves, rest their wings – those of them who had them, anyway – and stretch their limbs. Enya fell asleep several times, lulled to slumber by the slight rock of Father’s body as he flew and the permeating warmth of his skin in combination with her thick fur that warded off the biting chill of the wind. The third time she awoke from one of these naps, the sun was tinged red and was sitting on the horizon like a curled-up Poliwag.

Father angled his wings forward, the muscles at the base of the appendages knotting together with strain; it had been a long day, and even a Charizard with two perfect wings would be getting a bit sore by that point. Gliding over a patch of forest, making lazy swerves as he sniffed the air, Father eventually led the team to alight on a strip of marshy land. As soon as his feet touched the soft, soggy earth, he folded his wings in to his sides securely and breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Enya whispered, stricken, feeling the knots beneath her paws clench and relax with every one of the fire-type’s breaths. “I shouldn’t have ridden on you.”

The Charizard stretched and plucked the Eevee from his back, cupping her in his hands as though she were made of glass. “You will never be a burden to me,” he told her, holding her in front of his face as rust-colored eyes locked with guilty green ones. “Never mind that you weigh less than my smallest claw.”

“Hey!” Aunt Zap interjected irritably, lifting a large hind paw from the ground and gagging at the peaty soil clinging to it. “Not to ruin the touching moment, but _lightning_ , Kindle, you couldn’t have chosen a spot that’s a little more solid?”

“I like it,” Uncle Torrent said cheerfully, stretching out to his full length and rolling over until he'd caked his scales with mud. He ended up in a small bit of swamp that was far too small to accommodate him, but that didn’t stop him from trying to bury himself within it.

Aunt Zap scowled at the Gyarados. “How delightful for you. But then not all of us are water-types, are we, Torrent?”

Father set Enya carefully down on a tuft of dry marsh grass, where she yawned and scratched her ear languidly. Aunt Zap was short-tempered enough that it was more worrying when she wasn't sniping at someone, and the Eevee was used to it.

The same went for Mother, really, but her irritability was far scarier and explosive. The dragon-type was at the moment looped over several branches of a broad tree, swaying in the breeze like a vine and pretending to ignore everyone. But Enya could see that one eye was open just a crack, a sliver of scarlet gleaming against the gentle blue of the Dragonair’s cheek.

Father tossed a pebble at Aunt Zap and ducked the expected reciprocal shock of electricity. “The bog wasn’t my first choice, either, Zap,” he grimaced, “but it’s the only nearby place that hasn’t been scent-marked recently.”

“That’s because it’s disgusting here.” The Raichu grabbed her tail and began grooming its fur, turning her back to Father moodily.

Father spread his arms and nodded at his unguarded chest. “Anyone else have anything to say?”

Grandfather Zephyr shook his head with the sound of grating stone, and Mother simply contorted her tail into a gesture that Enya had quickly deduced was very rude. Mirage was meditating – or pretending to, at least; it was an effective way to stay out of an argument, and the Kadabra always said that quarrels were a waste of energy – a few feet above the sodden ground, and Torrent was busy making what could very easily have been called a purr of delight from within a thick layer of mud and vegetation.

Father nodded, satisfied, and kicked a clump of dirt at Aunt Zap’s back before turning back to Enya. He stooped to pick her up again but halted at the sudden call of Mother’s voice.

“Wait!” the Dragonair hissed, and then paused to think for a moment, disentangling herself from the branches and flying over to Father. “Kindle, your crusade for mediocrity is as pathetic as it is self-destructive.” Looking pleased with herself, she continued, “Okay, now I am done. You may move on.”

Father just keened and rubbed the nape of his neck with one hand. He did that a lot. “Just…” he muttered. “Let’s go find some common hunting grounds. Let’s just hunt. Please.” Mirage had explained in her strategy games that a tract of land was usually left unclaimed within a large stretch of territories exclusively to avoid feuds over prey; any Pokémon passing though could hunt there without repercussion.

“What about you?” Uncle Torrent asked, upside down and twisted improbably about himself like a length of living rope. “I know your wing’s bothering you, so don’t even pretend that you’re up for hunting. Do you want us to bring something back?”

Father looked as though he wanted to kiss the Gyarados. “That would be wonderful – maybe a couple of Goldeen if you can find them. Seafood sounds nice.”

Enya did not share the Charizard’s taste for water-types and made a disgusted noise, licking her nose with a shudder.

Mother smirked and gave the kit a small embrace with her tail. “Don’t worry, we’ll bring you something boring, like a Rattata.”

Enya perked up immediately and rubbed her face approvingly across the Dragonair’s scales. She favored the taste of normal-types, which was strange considering that she was a normal-type herself – typically, a Pokémon avoided eating within its own type bracket when it could.

Enticed by all this talk of food, the team (bar Father) took off in short order, Aunt Zap leading the way on Grandfather Zephyr’s back as she flatly refused to touch Uncle Torrent until he cleaned himself.

Father looked around – the unclaimed marsh territory was now a mess, given Uncle Torrent’s delighted acrobatics within it – and shook his head. The Charizard picked Enya up and tossed her softly toward a relatively unsullied patch of dirt, right underneath the tree in which Mother had been hanging. (This seemed curious until one realized that the Gyarados would have had to get within range of Mother to frolic in any mud near her.) She landed just like Aunt Zap had taught her, using her tail to keep her paws beneath her, and didn’t stumble at all.

“Very nice!” Father complemented her form as he trudged through the boggy earth toward the tree. “Must be lovely to have that kind of natural balance.” Reaching the drier earth, he smiled and nudged the Eevee in the side with one muddy foot. She squealed, partially with amusement and partially with indignation, and retreated gracelessly from the fire-type.

Father sat heavily at the base of the tree’s trunk, resting against it and patting his knee. Enya accepted the invitation readily and, in revenge for the mud that was now drying in her fur, made liberal use of her claws in her ascent to perch on the Charizard’s leg. The two remained that way for several minutes, watching the sun continue to dip further into the horizon; the dying light shimmered within the links of the chain around Father’s neck, tinting them almost the same color as his skin.

Enya had never seen the Pokéball that hung on the chain used before. Father never went into the thing, he just carried it around, and she wondered if maybe he would show her how it worked. She was a month old now, after all.

“Father?” she asked tentatively, knowing that his ball was a bit of a sore subject for some reason. He never even talked about his trainer; the kit imagined the human had died not long before she was born, so it made sense that Father would still be in mourning.

There was no response from the Charizard, just silence and a sudden stiffening of muscles. Enya winced, but gathered her courage and asked again, “Father?”

This time, there was a response. A snore that began somewhere deep in the fire-type’s chest and emerged from his mouth as a low roar that physically rattled the Eevee. He had fallen asleep, and the twitching of his muscles could be visibly traced up his body and around his shoulders and sides to his back. His wings must have hurt terribly, Enya realized, feeling another flush of guilt.

Her ears perked up at a memory: Mirage had given her a short lesson one day about edible and medicinal plants found in forests, and one that the Kadabra had called the Bubblebeam plant – because it looked kind of like a bunch of bubbles being shot into the air – could be used to relax muscles. If she dug one of those plants up, chewed its roots, and smeared the paste on Father’s back, it would make him feel better. It would require stealth, but she wasn’t a clumsy kit anymore. She could do it.

Plan in place, Enya crept down from the Charizard’s knee, careful not to rouse him; he would never let her go on her own to find a plant for him. Reaching the edge of the swampy area, the kit looked back at Father, who was still snoring away, his tail flame large and bright but spluttering every time another wave of tension went through his frame.

Enya turned from him and inhaled deeply, searching out the sickly, sweet smell of the Bubblebeam plant, just as Mirage had told her she should if ever she needed to find some.

* * *

Not ten minutes later, the Eevee was hopelessly lost. The scent trail she had been following had disappeared with a breeze, and now she was sitting just outside the borders of the forest. It was still technically daytime, twilight not having quite set in yet, but it was a little disconcerting to have no idea of where she was in relation to Father.

She supposed she could wail for a while and see if any of the team came to get her, but that would be not only embarrassing but possibly deadly as well. She was a tiny Pokémon after all, probably in someone else’s territory; Mirage would die of shame if Enya got herself killed so stupidly.

“Okay,” the kit muttered, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath. “Take a moment to think. You have a brain, so use it.” Her ears swiveled to the left at the sound of unfamiliar footsteps and, freshly reminded of her mortality as she was, she ducked hastily into the brush at the edge of the forest.

A creature came into view that she had never seen before: male, about the height of Mirage but with pale skin and saggy, colorful armor. No whiskers or tail or pointy ears, small feet and a flat face and black fur on top of his head.

He was a human, Enya realized with a jolt, the revelation as electrifying as one of Aunt Zap’s Thunderbolts.

The Eevee crept forward, unable to help herself as she strove to get a better look. The baggy armor must be what Uncle Torrent called clothing, which were like removable pelts that kept the human warm. The creature had a black ornamentation on his face, right across his eyes, and he carried something that looked kind of like the sack that Mirage carried everywhere, only it was black and hard and with – Enya squinted and inched forward again – a small Pokéball design on the surface.

The kit took another step forward, and another, behind the human now and feeling rather safe in her observation. She consciously held her breathing steady and shallow, but something behind her crackled – dry leaves impacted with a heavy foot – and she froze.

The human did not. He spun around, fumbling with the fasteners on his black sack, and before Enya could react, he pulled out a small silver device. Curious – the thing was not at all alarming, and Aunt Zap had made everything that humans made sound at least a little bit intimidating – she did not flee immediately.

The human pressed a button on the device like the ones on Dexter and held the thing up to one eye and spoke. It was gibberish, not at all the language of Pokémon; there was inflection, sure, but it seemed to hold less meaning than the distinct sounds being made. She recognized only one word: Eevee.

The human reached again into its sack and pulled out something small. It fit easily in the palm of his hand and Enya, eager to see more human stuff, still remained where she was, eyes wide and tail slowly swishing.

What happened next happened in rapid succession: the boy moved his thumb, the Pokéball in his hand became much larger, he threw it just as Enya shook herself out of her fascination and considered making a break for it, a red and white Pokémon that looked a lot like a Pokéball itself materialized from within a miasma of red light.

And suddenly all thoughts of escape were gone. Enya’s mind was clear and focused on her opponent – for surely this was one of Aunt Zap’s Pokémon battles – and she had no attention to spare for the human. She may have been little, but she had never felt so powerful or competent.

The Pokémon that looked like a ball cleared its throat – was that the proper term to describe something that didn’t really have even a neck? – to make sure that it had the Eevee’s attention. “Hi,” he coughed; it sounded like a cough, anyway, metallic and abrasive, but Enya suspected that this was his natural voice. “I’m Shock. I’m a Voltorb.”

Enya hissed and flattened her ears. The Voltorb was probably trying to lure her into a false sense of security – Aunt Zap had never mentioned introducing yourself to your opponent before the battle. “What.”

“It’s how you start a formal battle,” the other Pokémon said, taken aback. (That explained it. Aunt Zap was far too impatient for formalities.) “Is this your first battle?” Once Enya got used to the metal ring in its voice, the Voltorb sounded remarkably young.

“Yes.”

“Okay, listen. My trainer is going to make a record of this battle with that human thing in his hand. It’s for a task he was given from the place where he goes to learn – he must catch a wild Pokémon.” The Voltorb couldn’t quite meet her eyes.

“Me?”

“Yes. Sorry.”

Enya scoffed, beginning to understand Aunt Zap’s impatience. All of this talk was very dull, and every inch of her pelt was bristling with the desire to fight, thin muscles flexing from within her crouch. “Save your ‘sorry’s for if I actually get caught,” she growled. “My name is Enya, and I’m an Eevee. Let’s go.”


	7. Can't

“I can imagine it working out perfectly, I said. I can't, she said & I said no wonder you're so stressed”

* * *

The Voltorb was fast – Enya had to give it that. It barreled forward before she could blink, rolling over and over like a stone tossed into the air would. She braced herself and took the blow with gritted teeth, knocked violently over; remembering Aunt Zap’s advice, she rolled with the momentum and got back onto her paws.

Enya snarled and shook her head to rid her ears of a slight ringing, and then she sprang forward, running as quickly as she possibly could in her first Tackle attack. The Voltorb swerved out of her way, but she was moving smoothly enough that it was simple to turn and bodily slam herself into it. Her fur rose where it touched the other Pokémon, a harmless electric tingle racing over her skin.

The Voltorb groaned, blinking, and muttered, “Good hit,” before opening its mouth wide and emitting the most ungodly noise Enya had ever heard. She bit down on a pained wail and pawed at her ears. So this was what it felt like to have her defenses lowered; it was uncomfortable, like tendrils of iciness starting in her paws and creeping up her flanks – not enough to make her cold, really, but enough to produce a definite sensation of chill.

It was disconcerting, this loss of defense, so Enya decided to play it safe for a bit and called up a tiny sandstorm; it wasn’t all that intimidating, but when focused and directed toward the Voltorb’s metallic silver eyes it formed a fairly potent Sand-Attack. The electric-type orb whirled on its axis, scattering the sand, before lunging forward.

A couple more Tackles are traded without either opponent yielding ground. As Enya began to get accustomed to the rush of blood in her ears, the voice of the human trickled into her sphere of awareness – she squinted, adjusting to the male’s presence in her consciousness, which had previously just included herself and the Voltorb. There appeared to be a system to her opponents’ moves: the human would say something in his strange tongue and then his Pokémon would attack. Then Enya would respond, then the human would speak, then the Voltorb would attack.

It was like Mirage’s mind games of Pokémon battles, except Enya wasn’t playing at being a trainer this time. This battle was real and she was the wild Pokémon being fought.

This battle was dangerous.

The human spoke and the Voltorb sped forward to Tackle again; but its eyes screwed up and it wavered, slowing down and veering from its path as it blinked rapidly. A bit of her Sand-Attack must have gotten lodged in its eyes, Enya realized, darting easily out of the electric-type’s way.

Not intending to miss an opportunity, the Eevee growled, the snarl ripping from between raised lips revealing needle-sharp kit teeth; she wasn't powerful enough for it to be an actual attack, but it diverted the Voltorb’s attention and while it was distracted Enya pelted forward and leapt, a vague plan forming even as she executed it.

Her front paws hit the Voltorb an instant before her back paws did in an uneasy balancing act – the Pokémon’s surface was far harder than flesh and did not give way to her claws. The spherical creature beneath her spun in violent circles and the Eevee skittered in place with panic pumping through her body. She had only one shot at this.

“Get off!” the Voltorb spat, spinning backwards and sending Enya’s paws flailing. “What are you doing?”

The kit anchored herself on top of the electric-type by seizing onto the ridges above its eyes with her teeth and foreclaws. “Thish,” she responded with a low, muffled growl, sending a Sand-Attack straight into the Voltorb’s face.

It squawked and spun, but with Enya doggedly clamped onto it, sending wave after wave of sand into its eyes, it couldn’t escape the attack. Finally, after rolling over on top of the kit several times in a row, the Voltorb was able to fling her away.

Enya landed on her paws, tousled and grinning, the forest to her back and the grand tableau of Pokémon and trainer within rolling stretches of meadowland to her front. The male shouted something that Enya had by now realized was human-talk for “Tackle,” and the Voltorb, its eyes reddened and watery, shook itself with a sigh and obeyed.

The Voltorb approached. Enya gathered herself even as she glanced over her shoulder, paws steady beneath her and ears flat, her heartbeat echoing strangely loudly. The Voltorb approached.

It was three seconds away. She could almost feel her heartbeat within her face, throbbing: ba-bump, ba-bump.

Two. Ba-bump.

One.

Enya leapt up with all of the strength in her lean hind legs and then landed softly on the exact spot from which she had jumped.

The Voltorb, on the other hand, smashed headlong – again, would headlong really be the proper term when the Pokémon didn’t technically have a head? – into the tree in front of which the Eevee had been standing. It spun about weakly to face her, revealing a sizable crack in the tree’s trunk, and wobbled, eyes crossed and teeth gritted.

Then it fainted, rolling helplessly down the slope of the ground until the human recalled it to its Pokéball. Through the haze that the battle had submerged her in – the rush of her own breath and blood – Enya felt a thrill of triumph and a peculiar sort of lightness in her limbs. She had done her family proud, even if later Mother and Father would take turns shredding her tail for getting into danger.

She couldn’t quite bring herself to regret the battle, though; it had felt as natural as having a tail and four paws. Battling was something she was good at, one of those talents of which Mirage had spoken. (Father had been right: she did have greater skills than balancing, just like that Pokémon he had compared her to. She wished she had asked him who he was talking about at the time.)

The sound of a Pokéball being released sounded behind her, making her fur bristle uneasily. She lowered her head and turned it, half hiding behind her own front leg as she peered back at the human – or, more specifically, at the Pokémon who had materialized between herself and the trainer.

The shaggy, white creature – a male, just like the human – walked on two legs and had two arms, a thin tail, a squashed nose, and pointed ears. His flat brown eyes were slanted and harsh, and as his mouth opened, Enya saw the tips of gleaming fangs. The Pokémon reeked of aggression.

The Eevee swallowed, something primal within her informing her – screaming, really – that this was one battle that she did not want to fight. That she was at a disadvantage already and could not win. But there was another instinct there, too, assuring her with increasing loudness that she could win any battle against any Pokémon. If she ran, she would be a weakling, frightened as a newborn in the dark, and Enya, young as she was, knew that she was no coward.

So she faced the other Pokémon, shivering but with a determined glint in her green eyes, and said, “Enya. Eevee.”

Her opponent smiled widely, displaying four prominent white fangs and a slew of flat teeth. “Fist. Mankey.” He bent his knees calmly and Enya, despite herself, prepared to be on the defensive. Fist was a traditional fighting-type name, and Mirage had drilled type advantages into the Eevee’s brain during strategy lessons. (“Fighting. Advantage against Normal,” was all she had said, giving Enya the look that forbade her to do anything stupid now that she had the pertinent information.)

The human said something, and the Mankey became a blur. Enya barely had time to think, let alone move, before his foot connected with her legs and upended her roughly onto the short grass. Feeling her limbs protesting and joints popping, the Eevee twisted, unwilling to remain on her side, and managed to get her paws beneath herself. The fighting-type shrieked threateningly, shaking his fists and generally looking like he ate kits for breakfast.

Enya had the feeling that the Mankey would merely shrug off any of her low-level attacks; she would have to use cunning to win this battle, but the fighting-type didn’t seem to be too daft himself. The kit was fully aware that there was a very real chance she would lose and be caught and be taken away from her family, but still she could not shake the strange, pervasive sort of confidence that plagued her.

And so she suppressed a shudder and sprinted for a nearby tree with low branches, clawing frantically upwards. She vaulted from branch to branch, feeling the taut throb of bruises in her legs, until she was high enough to use the momentum of a jump to supplement a Tackle attack. (She hoped. She’d never used this tactic before but had heard Aunt Zap describing it while recounting her legendary battle with a Dragonite that had defeated Father.)

Her opponent looked as if he would scale the tree to chase her – he did looked built to climb, Enya realized belatedly – but then the human said something and he crouched instead, sending a Leer at the Eevee kit. Another chill swept over her, forcing a shiver down her spine and roughly stimulating her impulse to fight to the last. It was a sweep of warmth that combated the discomfort of her defense falling, but at the same time it was a fire that burnt beneath her skin – burning, burning until she moved.

Her mind awash, adrift, with this feeling, she darted to the end of the tree limb she was on and launched herself into a headlong dive. Like Uncle Zephyr using Sky Attack, she plummeted through the air, much quicker than the Mankey had apparently expected; he didn’t dodge in time. Enya’s skull smashed into the fighting-type’s with all of the force a kit of her size could manage – her ears ringing and a dull ache blossoming in her forehead, she could only hope it was enough to keep her in this battle.

He didn’t seem too fazed, though. In fact, he looked angry; literally, hopping mad. The Eevee’s thought was quickly validated by a one-handed blow across her back – that was weird, was his hand supposed to glow white like that? – that drove her into the ground.

She bit back a whimper – she was young, but not a newborn, after all – and struggled to her paws again. This time, it was genuinely difficult. There was a weight to her thin frame that made her desperate Sand-Attack less than effective, more scattered than focused toward the Mankey’s eyes.

The fighting-type’s second attack, the same glowing chop from before, was perfectly adequate, though. It knocked Enya into a rock, finally wrenching a sharp cry from the kit before she slumped, motionless, on the ground.

* * *

Alan Monroe was a smart boy. Top of his class at school, he could rattle off type match-ups like a professional auctioneer and devise battle strategies beautiful enough to make a chess master weep. He hadn’t gotten a grade poorer than one hundred and two percent on any written assignment since he’d finally cracked the experience matrix equation and its uses in the catch rate differential. But the marks of schoolboys did not reflect only tests and homework, so he found himself with distressing regularity facing what his father cheerfully referred to as “a practical application of textual studies.”

Alan preferred the rather more bald term “field work,” a teaching method he personally despised, believing that a solid grasp of theory provided any student with a perfectly sufficient knowledge base.

In other words, he was a prodigy removed from his textbooks and booted outside with nothing but his Pokéballs, a camcorder, and instructions to record himself battling and catching a wild Pokémon. He was in a Bad Mood.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He was pleased with his Mankey, which had made short work of a wild Eevee that had previously made short work of his Voltorb. He was pleased with the Eevee, too, a tough little thing with a good head for battle. It was strange, though; he had estimated on sight that she – a truly tiny female with what looked like some white kit fur still showing along her spine – couldn’t have been over level four, but she must have been significantly more powerful than that. After all, both of his Pokémon were level sixteen and she had lasted amazingly long against the both of them.

It did displease him to have been so off with his guess, so in a minor fit of pique, he refused to consult his Pokédex concerning the Eevee’s true level. Let it remain a mystery for a little bit.

Recalling his Mankey to its Pokéball, Alan slotted it back into his briefcase and removed an empty one. The whole process was a bit of a fumbling mess, given that he had to hold the camcorder steady as he worked, but he managed; the Eevee, slumped over a rock, was still but for her shallow breaths.

Alan threw the ball without a word (his classmates, and many famous trainers for that matter, had the irritating habit of shouting when they threw Pokéballs or released their Pokémon, as if the devices did not function automatically and needed orders). The sphere arched through the air and then smacked onto the Eevee’s flank, bouncing off and opening with a loud, echoing crack. Red light welled up within its depths, tendrils jetting out to envelop the wild Pokémon and claim her.

Alan was a smart boy, perceptive to a fault, but even he was taken aback by the appearance of a Raichu as it streaked out of the forest. The small electric-type squalled fiercely and collided with the Pokéball, snapping it shut with its body weight before the light could touch the Eevee. It then lay into the ball, striking it with the flat of its tail to knock it up into the sky before letting loose a Thunder that left the device, when it hit earth again, scorched and smoking.

The Raichu spared a glance for the Eevee and shot after the Pokéball after only a moment’s hesitation. The sound of lightning strikes and the sizzling of thoroughly fried machinery followed.

A roar suddenly sounded from within the dense wood, shaking the leaves on the trees and even the pebbles on the ground, and Alan took a step back, hugging his briefcase to his chest defensively and keeping his camcorder steady. This turn of events was potentially a good opportunity for extra credit.

But then a second roar joined the first, followed by another, and another. Each had a different timbre from the others – they were all the cries of different Pokémon – but they aggregated, building on top of one another and reaching a crescendo. Alan’s heart began to hammer wildly, his thoughts turning from his grade to his safety. A high-pitched whine wormed into his mind, a sound like the drone of a muted television when it’s turned on; a headache started to garner behind his eyes and in his temples.

His breathing labored and sweat breaking out on his tingling skin, Alan dropped the camcorder and clutched at his head, on the verge of tears.

They emerged from the forest like a storm, impossible to stop and reeking of danger. An Aerodactyl plowed through the trees like they were twigs, razing everything in its path with wide scything movements of its wings. The enormous creature gave Alan a menacing glare and a good view of its serrated fangs before settling with one massive taloned foot on either side of the Eevee, crouching over her defensively.

A Kadabra – was that a knapsack it had on its back? – had a translucent blue force field erected around the Eevee before it had even fully emerged from the trees. It bounded – awfully aggressively, the part of Alan that was still analyzing things thought, given that Kadabra usually just floated around on a wave of their psychic energy – taking gravity-defying leaps, onto the back of the Aerodactyl, where it squatted with a harsh aura sparking like electricity in its black eyes.

A Gyarados barreled through the wreckage left behind by the Aerodactyl, leveling shrubbery and saplings that had previously escaped decimation. Its blue scales were crusted with dried mud but this only made the serpentine Pokémon seem more menacing; it looped itself around the Aerodactyl’s legs, shielding the Eevee from view, and settled with unblinking purple eyes trained levelly on Alan.

Sudden movement within the wood – as if four terrifying Pokémon weren’t enough for Alan to need a change of pants when he got home, a first for the boy wonder who had potty trained himself by the age of one and a half – and a Charizard tore its way through whatever bits of forest remained standing, marching with large, aggrieved steps up to him and coming to a halt a couple feet away.

The Charizard’s tail flame kept spluttering and growing larger, and it growled like a freight engine as smoke and brilliant red sparks churned from its nostrils. They stared at one another, the boy trembling with a haze of tears steaming up his glasses and the fire-type breathing heavily, clenching and unclenching its fists with barely controlled rage.

Alan was so busy trying to find compassion in the Charizard’s hard rust-colored eyes that he didn’t see the streak of blue shooting toward him until it solidified into a Dragonair whose snapping teeth were an inch from his nose. Stumbling backward in fright, he landed on his rear and looked up to see that the Charizard had the dragon-type by the tail and was bodily hauling it back, away from him.

Something hard hit the back of Alan’s head, and he looked behind himself to see his Pokéball, broken roughly into four pieces connected by thin wires, lying on the ground, blackened with soot and smelling distinctly of smoke. The Raichu was close behind it, glaring at him with sporadic twists of electricity whipping from its cheeks.

Alan was a smart boy. He grabbed his briefcase and ran.

* * *

Kindle held onto Gale’s thrashing body long enough for the boy to disappear over the horizon, fleeing, he suspected, toward the nearby Cerulean City; the child had the look of a school boy, and Cerulean had one of the finest Pokémon schools in the region. It was nightfall now, but the Charizard figured the boy could make it to civilization before it became too dark to see.

“I am going to kill him!” Gale seethed, writhing furiously. “I am going to find him and give him the storm of the century! I am going to flood his house and strike him with lightning, and then, twisters, I am going to remove him from the face of the planet!” Kindle had his arms wrapped around her, just behind her head and about her middle, and she struck him repeatedly in the stomach and side with her tail as she cried out in a choked voice.

She didn’t even try to bite him, though.

It was truly astounding progress.

Eventually, Gale calmed in his grip, reduced to muttering curses under her breath, and he released her warily but with some measure of relief. His back was still tied up into knots of muscle and holding onto a struggling Dragonair hadn’t helped at all. It would have embarrassed him earlier, having to tromp up to the human on his feet like his wings didn’t exist, if that had been an emotion he could feel while on the verge of Fire Rage.

Cinders, but he deserved a trophy for not attacking the child. It had taken obscene self-control to wrestle back the Rage which urged him to punish the kid for trying to steal Enya, but he’d managed, snapping out of it fully when he’d heard the lethal whoosh of an incoming Gale.

A short distance away, Zap gave the ruined remains of a Pokéball a small, vicious kick with her large hind paw. Kindle could only assume that she had stopped the device from claiming Enya and had then taken out all of her aggression on it; the Raichu had quite magnificent stores of aggression from which to draw, and he would have bet a week of flight that she’d had more fun than was strictly necessary.

Zap, having trashed the Pokéball to her satisfaction, looked up at Kindle with a grave, knowing look like she was well aware of how difficult it had been for him to resist harming a child.

“Kindle?” Torrent said hesitantly. “Not to interrupt the meaningful eye contact you’re making with Zap, but I think Enya needs help.”

Within moments, Kindle, Zap, and Gale were at the Gyarados’s side; he was curved in a crescent shape behind Zephyr and was gazing sadly at the scrap of brown and white fur huddled between the Aerodactyl’s talons.

“What is the matter?” Gale asked haltingly. It was almost frightening to hear the unconcealed panic in her voice, she who feared nothing and no one. The Dragonair extended her tail to stroke the kit but then drew back, not daring to touch Enya when she was so obviously injured – and what injuries they were. Thick, dark bruises visible even though her fur, open sores on her legs and back, an unnatural angle to her forelimbs.

It was only Kindle’s hand on Gale’s flank that kept her from renewing her pursuit of the boy, and it was only Zap’s paw on Kindle’s knee that kept him from letting her.

“All right,” Kindle started, rubbing his hands together just so they’d have something to do. “We’ll wait for her to wake up naturally and then give her those baby Potions Jed put in the bag. Just like we did with me. We’ll let her sleep it off and then fix her. That’ll work, right?” He was babbling.

Somehow, it seemed inevitable that Mirage would shake her head. “When one is asleep, one’s mental barriers are lowered. I can feel her pain. She has two broken ribs, internal bleeding.”

There was silence for the span of several heartbeats, and Kindle imagined he could hear the grating of broken bone within his Enya’s fragile little body as she breathed. “No chance that forcing a Hyper Potion down her throat would do anything, is there?” he asked half-heartedly.

“Well, it might kill her,” Torrent supplied in monotone. It was a universally acknowledged rule never to give a very young Pokémon anything stronger than a regular Potion, but Jed had seen fit to prescribe an even smaller dose than that for Enya. A more potent medicine might shock her system so much that her internal organs would shut down and all involuntary processes like breathing could fail.

Kindle knew all that. But internal bleeding wasn’t a much better way to go.

Zephyr cleared his throat and shuffled his feet on either side of Enya, giving the distinct impression that he wanted to provide protection but was rather afraid of squashing her. “One option remains, Kindle, my friend,” he sighed. “We cannot be of assistance to her in this place, and we certainly cannot do nothing to rectify this situation. She must be taken to a human center of healing.”

Kindle knew that, too.

“We cannot,” Gale snapped moodily, turning in tight, angry circles. “Kindle, twisters take him, was right when he said that humans are dangerous when Enya is not with us.”

Zap twisted one ear between her paws in consternation. “It’s not so simple, Gale. You know it’s not. Enya could die here.” The Dragonair had nothing to say to that, letting loose a melodic keen as she abandoned her loops and drew herself into a ball. Zap turned to Kindle, still worrying her ear. “Same question, Charizard,” she demanded. “Well, same statement. Accusation. Whatever.”

He shot a desperate glance at Zephyr, Mirage, and Torrent, but they all looked as wretched as he felt. “I don’t know, Zap! Cerulean City is large, but would that hide us or make it more likely for us to be caught? I don’t know.”

Torrent’s head rose abruptly. “But who says we have to go to Cerulean?” he pointed out, sliding out from behind Zephyr and distancing himself from the others so he could gesture as he spoke. “There was a small Pokémon Center on the City’s borders, barely deserved the name, remember? Full of equipment that should have been replaced years ago, but everything functioned just fine – fixed your wings, Zeph. We were there for six hours waiting for you to get out of surgery and no one came in, absolutely no one.”

“Of course!” Zap exclaimed. “The old couple who ran that place didn’t even ask how you’d broken both wings. They just saw you needed help and got down to it. Kindle –”

The Charizard was already instructing Mirage to form a sort of psychic web in which Enya could be suspended without being jostled as they flew. “What?” he asked, irritated with the interruption.

“Never mind.”

* * *

It was barely forty-five minutes later that they landed outside of the Pokémon Center, but Enya’s breathing was beginning to sound wet and labored and to Kindle it seemed that they had been flying forever without getting anywhere.

The Center – more of a shack, really, small and wooden with only a lobby and three rooms for observation, surgery, and recovery, plus the attic in which the couple who ran the place lived – looked even more rundown than it had the last time the team had passed by. It could use a fresh paint job, to say the least, although a complete renovation wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Kindle didn’t care, as long as the machinery inside could heal his Enya. Barring that, getting her out of the chilly night air was a top priority, so he wasted no time in shepherding Mirage and her precious package toward the front door. “Gale, Zap, you’re with Mirage and me inside. Torrent and Zephyr, there’s no way you’d fit through the door, so stay out here and keep guard. Inconspicuously.” He gazed up at their towering forms – the colossal bulk of the Gyarados and the formidable stature of the Aerodactyl – and sighed. “Well, as inconspicuously as you can. Just try to stay out of sight.”

With that, he turned and barged through the door into the Pokémon clinic, past a small, scattered array of chairs to the left, the spiraling staircase to the right, that grainy television mounted in the corner that was always tuned to a local news show – not much had changed since he was there last, right down to the peeling blue paint on the three doors behind the counter and the pervasive scent of antiseptic cleaner. It was dark and shadowed and quiet as a graveyard.

Kindle rapped his knuckles on the front counter since there was no little golden bell to ring; when that failed to yield either the sharp old woman who specialized in trauma or the pleasant old man who handled the more mundane cases, he roared. It was a soft roar, for a Charizard, more of a polite alert than a threat, but when the elderly couple came stumbling down the stairs from the attic, the husband wielded a large lantern and the wife had a shotgun held ready. The woman’s hair was cropped into short white curls, while the man’s was long and grey and formed a messy halo around his head. Both were in their nightgowns and had faces creased by slumber and age, and neither looked too thrilled to see strange Pokémon in their lobby.

Kindle held up his empty hands, grunting for the others to do the same as a show of good intent. It was pointless for a Pokémon to do so, of course, given that Zap alone could do significant damage without the use of her hands at all, but it got the message across. After squinting severely through her bifocals at the four of them, the woman lowered the gun, and the man came forward with the lantern to peer at the unexpected guests.

Gale thumped Mirage with her tail and the Kadabra brought Enya forward after stinging the Dragonair with a pinch of psychic power.

“Esther!” the man gasped, reaching automatically up to retrieve the Eevee. His hand encountered Mirage’s layer of protection and ended up resting on that, a wavering blue outline forming around his fingers. “They’ve got a kit here. An Eevee kit, and it looks bad.”

The lights snapped on to reveal that the woman had deposited her gun in the corner and turned on all of the equipment in the surgery room. “Tell me something I don't already know, Gene,” she scolded. “I saw the poor thing as soon as soon as your lantern got close enough.” She had once been in the army as a medic for the Pokémon troops, and had never really grown out of the military mindset. “Bring it in here. Do hurry it up – I don’t like wasting time when there’s a kit involved.”

Gene’s fingers began to sink into Mirage’s psychic web, so he quickly dropped the lantern and brought both hands up, pushing forward until he could cradle the kit fully. The blue psychic power dissipated and Enya slumped into his grasp; he shuffled to the door of the surgery room and handed the kit to his wife, who thanked him briskly and asked if he was planning on standing in the doorway all night.

“No, love,” Gene replied dutifully, turning only to flick off the lights in the lobby. “This could take a while,” he cautioned. “Try to get some sleep, dears. Turn off the T.V. if it bothers you too much.”

Then he followed his wife into the surgery room and shut the door behind him, leaving the lobby dark but for the flicker of the screen and the streaks of light that edged around the sides of the door.

The Pokémon remained still and silent – the only sounds in the room their quiet breaths and the fuzzy hum of low-volume speech from the television – for another twenty minutes until Zap couldn’t take the tension anymore.

“Bless them,” she murmured, staring with large brown eyes at the surgery room. “Dragged out of bed to do surgery in their pajamas and bedroom slippers.” She hopped up onto one of the lobby’s few chairs and kneaded the cushion with her paws. “When Enya’s human again and, you know, not bleeding internally, we should definitely stop by here again and thank these guys properly.”

“What are you doing?” Gale hissed at the Raichu.

“Sleeping, I should think,” the electric-type responded, settling down. “Rather hard with you talking to me, though.”

“How can you sleep at a time like this?” Kindle growled quietly. “Enya’s in the other room and –”

“And she’s in the best possible hands under our circumstances,” Zap finished, shutting her eyes resolutely. “I’m not going to help by fretting; I’ll just wear myself out and I expect that I’ll need all of my energy in the near future if today’s events are anything to go by.”

“But –”

“I’m exhausted, and I didn’t even fly today. Can’t imagine how the three of you feel.”

Kindle and Gale exchanged a look, reading the reluctant acknowledgment of bone-deep weariness that had crept into their minds at Zap’s prompting. They looked over at Mirage in turn only to find her already asleep, sitting with her back to the chair on which Zap was curled.

“Cinders, Zap.”

“Twisters, but I hate you.”

“Don’t curse at me,” the Raichu muttered sleepily. “And no, you don’t. Go to sleep.”

Kindle was the first to give in, dropping to the floor gracelessly and rolling onto his side. He tucked his head into his chest and flattened his wings to his back– maybe he’d get Gene or Esther to look at his cramping wing tomorrow morning, if it was still acting up – and tried to think of something, anything, besides the fate of his poor little Eevee kit. His Enya. His trainer.

Gale, never one to enjoy being alone even in her antagonistic Dragonair state, folded soon enough; Kindle could hear the rustling of her scales against one another as she coiled up on the ground. She shifted restlessly – her ribbed tail scratched at the wooden floor every time it twitched and her head feathers fluttered as she turned her face from side to side – and mumbled unintelligible things to herself. Eventually, she sighed. She got up and, after a moment’s hesitation, thrust herself into Kindle’s crossed arms, laying her head on the floor behind his neck and wrapping her tail around his several times.

The Charizard felt surprise dulled by lethargy, but made room for her readily enough. It was not uncommon for one of his teammates to sleep with him, though Gale hadn’t done so in a very long time, so he paid her intrusion on his space no mind.

And absolutely no one paid mind to the television, which was currently playing the Breaking News segment of the Cerulean City news show. A balding man in a blue pinstriped suit smiled enigmatically for the camera and introduced himself as Keith Burns, reporting to you live.

“The breaking news for this evening occurred just over an hour ago. Alan Monroe, local boy prodigy famous for his development of the Pokéball Catch Rate equation, was just outside the City limits collecting data for a school project. He had just defeated a wild Eevee and had thrown the Pokéball to catch it when he saw this…” The man’s voice trailed off meaningfully and the video cut to a shaky recording of a Raichu speeding out of a forest and attacking a Pokéball. Keith Burns, reporting to you live, dramatically narrated what was happening while the footage lurched and flipped sickeningly as the video camera was dropped on its side, the sound of a boy’s gasps and a mounting roar rattling the cheap speakers of the camcorder. An Aerodactyl thrashed through the trees, followed by a Kadabra and a Gyarados, all of whom converged on something just out of the shot.

Then there came a Charizard, looking livid with a red spark in its eyes, a Pokéball on a chain around its neck. It stood just within the camera’s frame and breathed heavily for several moments, smoke and fire spewing from its nostrils, when finally a Dragonair came shooting from the wood like a bullet. The Charizard somehow managed to catch the dragon-type, and the boy’s wheezes faded and disappeared as he ran from the scene.

The news show cut back to Keith Burns, reporting to you live, and he arched an eyebrow at his invisible audience. “The Pokémon you just saw then talked for some time and left, taking the Eevee that Alan Monroe was going to catch with them. That’s something you don’t see every day! I don’t know what to make of it, and neither did poor Alan, who returned home safely shortly after this video was taken. His parents returned to the scene with him later to retrieve the camera and thought it extraordinary enough to take to us. So what do you think?

“Was this merely a case of wild Pokémon protecting one of their own? Surely not – what about the Pokéball around the Charizard’s neck? So where did they come from? Why are they together? How did they cooperate so well? And, most importantly, why were they out on their own? Where is their trainer? So many questions, so few answers, but one thing is certain: these Pokémon are extremely dangerous. If you see them, please alert the authorities and do not approach. Good night.”

The news show went to a commercial break, and the extremely dangerous Pokémon in question slept on.


	8. Anxious

“My grandma used to plant tomato seedlings in tin cans from tomato sauce & puree & crushed tomatoes she got from the Italian restaurant by her house, but she always soaked the labels off first. I don't want them to be anxious about the future, she said. It's not healthy.”

* * *

The first thing she noticed was the horrid smell of the place: excrement and chemicals and vomit and metal and blood and, beneath it all, the reek of fear, pungent and almost tangible. There was a reason she stayed on Level Four, she reminded herself; Levels Two and Three were the laboratories, and no one went in there who wasn’t paid to do so.

The second thing she noticed, as the final sanitation barrier lowered with a faint whir, was the raucous cacophony of Pokémon voices. The creatures never shut up, never, except for when they were drugged – endless layers of noise, thready whines and ear-splitting cries in tumult around the spacious lab.

It was enough to give anyone a homicidal complex, really.

The sound of her sensible heels clacking dully against the linoleum as she strode into the fray was enough to calm the bustle of the room. The Pokémon continued making their infernal noises, of course, but the low rumble of human speech faded within moments; the squeak of machinery slowed and stopped, and several hisses sounded around the lab as steam was released from pneumatic workings.

She thought that maybe even the Pokémon responded to her presence to some extent – they didn’t quiet, but she fancied that the smell of fear grew stronger. Maybe it was her imagination. She hoped not.

She passed through a pillar of foul-smelling smoke and coughed lightly before speaking in low, pleasant tones. “I want everyone who doesn’t know what I mean when I say ‘P-72’ to leave now.” The ruckus the Pokémon were making almost, but not quite, covered up a wave of relieved sighs as dozens of footsteps took up an exodus.

“Those of you who remain know the situation.” She continued speaking as soon as the laboratory’s stainless steel doors, strong enough to hold back a rampaging dragon-type, slid shut with a deceptively gentle series of clicks. (The little tapping sounds were, in fact, deadlock seals embedded within the door snapping closed; they would not unlock again without the command of someone who had a valid hand scan and the correct password.) “The manhunt for Lyle continues. No one's connected her disappearance to Scarlet City yet, but her Charizard took her, her bag, and her other Pokémon and effectively fell off of the face of the planet. And I am not happy about that.”

“We have all available forces out looking for her already! We’re scanning every major network for mention of her, but there’s been nothing but that damn missing person ad and hundreds of false alarms.”

An exasperated hiss escaped her. “Shut up, Yellow. I am. Not. Happy. And I’m not really interested in your excuses.”

“We are doing all we can – you can’t ask for more.” There was some nervous throat-clearing and feet-shuffling.

“It’s not enough.” She irritably cut off a further attempt at words. “I want you to speed up training and get as many Morphs into circulation as you can.”

Another voice contributed warily. “I’m sorry, Green, but we simply can’t. We’re already cycling through them too quickly; their psyches are delicate, especially in the early stages – any more pressure and we’ll start to lose them faster than we’re making them.”

“Then I suggest, Silver, you give me some good news before Team Rocket starts losing _scientists_. Yellow. Talk to me.”

“Ah, yes. Good news. Because there’s so much of that going around.”

Another voice pressed in unassumingly at this point. “There’s the success we’ve had with the serum modifications.”

There was a loud swallow and the sustained clinking of rattling test tubes within lab coat pockets. “Yes, of course, White. The mods. Well, Ruby can tell you. She's the head of the project and the rest of us don't know a thing.”

“A beautiful cop-out, Yellow. Makes me wonder what you’re hiding.” It was almost audible, the way her eyebrows rose. “Ruby, was it? I remember your proposal. Very ambitious, but still theoretical. I gather there’s been a change on that front.”

“Y-yes, sir.” The words stumbled over themselves briefly, but regained their footing and forged bravely onward. “I haven’t made a report yet because it’s not totally conclusive, but the case studies are looking very promising. They’re only a little over one month old at this point, and all indications are that my theories were correct.”

The first voice became sharp enough to draw blood. “Would that ‘little over a month’ be quantified as a month and two days?”

“Not _exactly_.” She cowered a bit behind her technicality. “The experimental serum was distributed over the course of two weeks, but…yes, a month and two days falls within that time bracket. I’m sorry! I swear, I didn’t tell you right away because three cartridges of the normal P-72 stock had gotten checked out that night and I thought Lyle had been dosed with that! Thought that until about thirty seconds ago, actually; it didn’t even cross my mind that my mods had been used.” There was a moment of hesitation. “Is there any chance she was given the unmodified serum?”

It must have been difficult to speak through teeth that were so busy grinding together, but she managed. “Well? Is there?”

“No, sir. I remember signing up for Ruby’s experiment and checking out one of her cartridges. They were labeled very clearly.”

“Fantastic.” Her voice was seeped in cold, caustic fury. “That is just what we need, White, thank you so much. Lyle still at large, with poor little Ruby’s additions to the morphic serum running through her veins. Perfect. I thought I told you to give me good news, Yellow.”

“Strictly speaking, I think this one’s Ruby’s fault.”

She was suddenly cheerful, frighteningly so. “Perhaps, but I like Ruby. Ruby doesn’t talk back.”

There was the rustle of crisp clothing as it was pulled back and a click, followed by an alarmingly loud bang that managed to plunge the laboratory into silence. Even the Pokémon were hushed. There was a sudden metallic, tangy scent in the air, but no one imagined for a second that it was the smell of the machinery. A quiet sob was bitten back.

“Now, not only has Lyle fallen off the face of the planet, but I have a cheeky scientist who will be needing a hospital for a while and there are three inexplicably missing cartridges of P-72 that have been gone for over a month without anyone thinking to tell me. I am. _Not_. _Happy_.”

* * *

“I am not happy, twister-brain,” Gale hissed, alternating between whipping restlessly around the lobby and thumping Kindle in the side with her tail. “The rest of us were where the danger should have been. We were _hunting_ ; you were in unclaimed territory, and all you had to do was watch over a single kit.” The Charizard didn’t protect himself but took the abuse, which was, admittedly, significantly lighter than it would have been in the recent past.

Zap had found a travel package of Pokémon food somewhere and was nibbling on its contents absently as she watched the Dragonair lay into Kindle. Mirage was still asleep, but that wouldn’t last long, given how Gale’s emotions were roiling; one didn’t have to be a psychic-type to sense the tension in the air.

“A single Eevee kit who used to be your trainer,” Gale went on, wrapping her tail around the Charizard’s neck and yanking on it halfheartedly, “and now calls you Father. You couldn’t even keep her safe.”

The Dragonair had been expounding along the same lines since she had woken up at daybreak; Kindle assumed that the inevitable tirade had been delayed this long because she’d been too preoccupied with anxiety to compose it. But she’d had all night to think on it, to dream about the perfect array of accusations and condemnations. She could probably go on for hours. And frankly, he deserved it, so he kept still and worried silently about Enya.

“You did not even make it _difficult_ for her to wander off alone – you fell asleep! You fell asleep, and if Zap’s ears were not so good, we would never have known she was in trouble.”

Gale let Kindle’s neck go and resumed her agitated circling. He took the opportunity to glance through the nearest window – scrubbed until immaculately clean because Esther could handle her house being derelict, but never dirty – and reassure himself that Zephyr and Torrent were all right. The area surrounding the Pokémon Center was largely grassland with the occasional scarp of rock or scrubby brush; the Gyarados was on guard while the Aerodactyl slept, both huddled into the lee of an outcropping – no one would notice them who wasn’t looking for them.

“She could have been caught! She could have been killed, she could have been lost. And you were  _napping_ .”

Mirage stirred and opened her eyes blearily; she was never at her most coherent right after rousing from her bi-monthly rests, and the ambient emotions couldn’t have been making the process of waking up any easier. She even let slip an audible curse as she shakily levitated herself into a sitting position mid-air (“ _Miasma_ , everyone needs to stop thinking so loudly”). The Kadabra reached blindly for Zap, who took hold of her dented spoon and let a trickle of electricity run into the psychic-type’s body.

Mirage jerked slightly, her black eyes flying open and her hovering becoming steadier as awareness returned to her in full. Zap nodded toward Kindle and Gale and put a finger to her lips, whispering, “Gale’s been going at it for about forty-five minutes now. I give her ten more before she either runs out of material or collapses.”

Groggily, Mirage stared at the scene and then muttered, "Twenty."

"You're on. Winner gets first fight next time there’s a battle.” Zap resumed her eager by-standing.

Kindle ducked his head to avoid a blow from the Dragonair’s tail; she spun with the momentum and halted in battle position: body curled into one full ring, head level and pointed like an arrow at her opponent. “I would end you here and now if Enya were not so fond of you for reasons I cannot fathom.”

No one was entirely sure whether she was talking about her trainer or her kit, and no one got the chance to find out since at that moment Gene shuffled out of the surgery room, stifling a yawn and looking very pleased with himself. The old man flipped on the overhead lights with a muttered, “Good morning.”

He suddenly had the attention of every Pokémon in the room – Kindle’s focus snapped instantly to him; Zap leapt off of her chair and landed on the Charizard’s tail before scrabbling up to perch on his head; Mirage came forward, eyes open and curious; and Gale’s gaze shifted from Kindle to Gene with no change in intensity.

The grey-haired man shifted his weight, a little uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the four obviously powerful and obviously desperate Pokémon. He hadn’t been a nurse for almost forty years for nothing, though, and soon recovered his poise and smile. “You will all be glad to know that the kit will be fine.”

A considerable amount of tension leaked out of the room like air from a balloon; Gale dropped her battle-ready pose and Kindle’s shoulders slumped with relief. Gene took the opportunity to frown at his nightgown, noticing with a quirk of his brow that he had skipped two buttons when fastening it up.

“She looked a lot worse than she was,” he continued, trying unsuccessfully to straighten the two sides of his night clothes and quickly giving up. “Light sprains in her forelimbs, a few large but superficial cuts and contusions, one broken and one fractured rib, mild pneumothorax, and minimal internal bleeding. Nothing life-threatening except that a splinter of the broken rib punctured her lung.” Gene turned a dial on the wall and the fluorescents dimmed, a projector thrumming to life on the ceiling and casting a rectangle of white light on the middle door behind the counter.

“With an adult, we’d typically go in, remove the shard, and then leave the Pokémon to its own devices,” he said as he pulled a small remote control out of a drawer under the counter and futzed with the buttons for a moment before finding the one he wanted. Pressing it with both thumbs, he glanced up at the projector and over to the door, eyebrows raising triumphantly when an x-ray was displayed. “Pokémon have remarkable healing capabilities, but we don’t like to take chances with the young ones, especially small, fragile ones like your Eevee. So we removed the shard and patched her up a bit internally.” He pointed at bits of the x-ray with the remote, but the whole thing mostly looked like blotches of white and black and flakes of blue paint to the observing Pokémon.

Gene seemed to notice their glazed expressions and pointed more carefully at the display. “This is the kit’s head and tail, and that’s her spine, and these are her ribs. This is the broken one, and this is her left lung before and after we did the surgery.” He flipped between two images, the only discernible difference being the sudden absence of a little white blotch around the image of Enya’s lungs.

Kindle didn’t much care about what the x-ray had to show as long as he knew Enya would be all right. When Esther’s sharp voice came from within the surgery room, calling, “Stop showing off the new machine and come help me, Gene!” her husband jumped, startled; the Charizard smirked with mirth born of relief and bounced anxiously on his toes with his hands clasped behind his back.

Gene ducked back into the surgery room and then emerged again pushing a small wheeled dolly topped with an old pink towel tucked around a small mound of brown fur. Kindle and Gale started forward impulsively, but Esther moved with surprising alacrity to block their way, hands on her hips and a stubborn twist to her thin mouth.

“No, no, not one more step,” she said sternly with a glint to her pale grey eyes that had once successfully confined a full platoon of Machamp and Rhydon to the infirmary. “Your presence may well be an undiscovered analgesic, but until that is proven the only thing that poor kit needs right now is good drugs and lots of rest.  _Undisturbed_ rest.” Gene and the dolly vanished into the recovery room, followed by the longing gazes of Enya’s Pokémon.

But none of them moved an inch. Kindle was overprotective, Zap contrary, Mirage dismissive of rules, and Gale, well, Gale – but none of them was stupid.

The look in Esther’s eyes softened, and she carefully folded her thin arms in front of her chest; all of the buttons on her nightgown were, naturally, done up with military precision. “Now go outside for a while. Hunt, fly, do something besides mope around here. Or,” she amended, seeing the sudden rebellious body language of a couple of the Pokémon in front of her, “if you must stay here, you can at least sort the new supplies of medicine we got a few days ago. They’re in the observation room and they are an absolute  _travesty_ .  _Honestly_ , the Pokémon Union these days is not  _at all_  like it was back when I worked with their medical branch.”

Kindle snorted and crossed his own arms. As grateful as he was to the old woman and her husband for caring for his Enya, he was not particularly interested in listening to complaints about the Pokémon Union. The welfare of the Eevee kit in the next room had his full attention.

Esther seemed to realize this, and sighed, cutting to the point. “Those are your choices, Pokémon. Go outside, or help sort supplies here.” Her hawkish eyes tracked Kindle, Gale, and Zap as they rushed forward eagerly, and got caught by the television: still turned on in the corner of the room, it churned out indistinct audio as it had all night. “Certainly, whatever you do, don’t watch this nonsense. No one watches this news station anymore, not since the two senior news anchors were discovered to be simultaneously having an affair. _With each other’s spouses_.” With that, she marched up to the television set and snapped it off with an irritated twist of her bony fingers.

When she turned back around, the door to the observation room was ajar and the only Pokémon left in the lobby was Mirage, who shrugged and floated, serene, to sit on a chair, where she immediately fell asleep again. A few anxiety-filled hours of slumber were not nearly enough for a psychic-type of her power to function well.

Esther ran her fingers through her curly hair and closed her eyes wearily as the sudden hush within the Pokémon Center crashed over her sleep-deprived mind.  _Bed_ , was the old woman’s only thought after a few moments of this; she picked up her shotgun and began to stagger up the stairs.

* * *

Several hours later, the sun was not yet straight overhead, still slanting through gaps between the warped planks of wood that made up the walls. Kindle broke the adhesive lining the edges of the last heavy-duty cardboard box and tossed it to Zap, who quickly flattened it out and added it to the towering pile in the corner of the small rectangular room.

One wall was almost entirely taken up by a window, a thin sheet of cracked glass that separated the observation room from the recovery room. It was little more than a formality, really – one heavy breath could probably have sent the whole sheet of glass crashing down – but Kindle couldn’t bring himself to look through it too often.

Enya hadn’t moved. Not for hours, not since she’d been wheeled in and settled by a window; Gene, still in his nightgown, had settled at her side in a rickety rocking chair with a book and had promptly fallen asleep, mouth slack and reading glasses askew. The slab of sunlight across her blanket shifted and fattened as time passed and morning trickled by, but Enya hadn’t so much as twitched an ear, and the Charizard knew he was only depressing himself by looking at her every few seconds.

Gale, on the other hand, hadn’t looked anywhere else. It had fallen entirely to Kindle and Zap to unload and sort through Esther’s medical supplies – though, to be honest, neither of them were very surprised by this – as the Dragonair gazed levelly, unblinking, past the webby cracks in the glass wall and at the tiny lump under the sheets that was Enya. For a Pokémon who made a point of not caring about anyone, Gale was actively breaking a lot of her own rules to pine like that in front of her team. She paced back and forth in front of the large window mechanically, never stopping and never looking away.

Zap, for her part, wasn’t sure if she wanted to stare at Enya or distract herself at all costs, and it was a moot point anyway since the glass partition didn’t extend down far enough toward the floor for her to be able to see into the next room. The Raichu just gritted her teeth and got on with stacking bottles of penicillin and rolls of gauze next to the new EKG monitor.

Esther hadn’t been kidding when she said that the shipment had been a travesty – no two of the same item had been packed together in the same container, none of the labels had been wholly correct, and there had not been one undented box in the whole lot. Not to mention the state of the supplies themselves: upside down and unraveled and smashed together and, in some cases, simply broken. The Pokémon had salvaged what they could, organizing everything and separating like items into neat groups against the far wall, but it was tedious, time-consuming work.

Which was, actually, probably not a bad thing for the three Pokémon involved, none of whom were known for their ability to sit still. (A wise move on Mirage’s part to go back to sleep – who knew what trouble they would have gotten up to if she had made short work of the unpacking with her psychic powers?) Unfortunately, there were now no other boxes to unload and Zap could already feel the anxiety mounting. Kindle’s tail flame began to splutter and grow as he stared at his uselessly clenched hands, and a few paces ago Gale had taken to hissing through bared teeth each time she turned around.

So, all in all, it was a good thing that Enya stirred when she did. She let out a low whine and endeavored to curl up further; Zap heard the first and Gale saw the second, and both were bolting out the door before Kindle could even glance up from his interlaced fingers. Quickly guessing the reason for his teammates’ swift departures, the Charizard allowed himself a glimpse through cracked glass of the gradually reviving kit as he himself shot out the door.

Gene was stationed firmly in their way, the fire-type discovered after a moment, but the old man didn’t seem to intend to stop them. He just held up a finger dotted with liver spots and shook it as he ordered, “Two at a time only. And don’t distress her.” He then stepped aside smartly and poked his head into the observation room that the Pokémon had just vacated, making stunned, appreciative noises at the sight of the orderly piles of supplies.

A wide-eyed Kindle looked down at Zap, and she graciously – if dramatically – swept an arm out in front of her chest as if to say,  _After you_ . The Charizard gave the Raichu a thankful look that promised some sort of reward as soon as he could think of anything besides his Enya and jolted forward; the electric-type dropped her melodrama to halt the Charizard’s abrupt motion with a paw on his knee to add, “I may not know anything about anything that’s happened this past month, but I do know that that kit is going to need her Father and Mother more than human Enya ever needed Kindle the Charizard or Gale the Dragonair. Careful with how you do this, yeah?”

The fire-type frowned, unhappy even after all this time to think that his kit and his trainer were not one and the same, but nodded before following Gale into the recovery room. The Dragonair, of course, had barged in the moment Gene had moved away, heedless of her two other teammates.

Zap just sighed and resigned herself to grooming her fur, alone, until Mirage woke up again or she could take her turn at the kit’s side. At least she was ahead of Zephyr and Torrent in line – the poor Aerodactyl and Gyarados were  _forever_ last in line due to their sizes. Forever on guard duty, forever on the periphery of anything that happened indoors.

_Disgruntlement loves company, I suppose_ , the Raichu thought to herself.  _I feel better already_ .

Her mood only improved when, a few minutes later, a raucous shriek split the (boring) calm that prevailed within the Pokémon Center. It was Zephyr’s battle cry, and Zap was on the verge of leaping to her paws and sprinting out to help him fight – let it be something vicious and powerful and determined to eat us all! – when the Aerodactyl’s voice was joined by a Gyarados’s. The voices roared out inarticulate curses at each other before there came the clash of rock striking hard scales.

Lightning. Just Zephyr and Torrent going at it, then. The two often resorted to brutal play-battles that only marginally deserved the “play” rating to conquer boredom, and it  _had_ been a long, uneventful night followed by an equally uneventful day. Zap could hardly blame them for wanting to vent some aggression and energy at this point, but she still pouted and decided, in light of the fact that she wanted to remain vaguely bitter about the whole thing so that she could make Kindle feel guilty later, that she would not go out and join them.

The battle cries and sounds of elemental attacks pounding the earth continued for a few more minutes, and Zap resented every single one of them.


	9. Conversations Scattered

“I wish you could have been there for the sun & the rain & the long, hard hills. For the sound of a thousand conversations scattered along the road. For the people laughing & crying & remembering at the end. But, mainly, I wish you could have been there.”

* * *

Enya woke slowly, a certain fuzziness clouding her mind even as she registered vague pain and instinctively curled up against it. Not quite ready to face the world feeling as she did, she took note of each of her senses in turn and gradually built up an understanding of her surroundings.

Touch: she was on her side, on top of something soft and scratchy and warm. A weak breeze ruffled the fur on her face and ears, one of which she twitched to ensure working order.

Hearing: there was low, steady breathing to her left. Just one creature. No, two, but they were breathing at the same pitch and rate. Several Pidgey were singing a Sun Ballad but sounded muffled. She was surrounded by something then – a shelter. Maybe a cave.

Scent: most immediate were Father and Mother, of course. She should have known they would be nearby, though she would have liked to avoid them for a little longer after having been in a losing battle. A strange, sharp smell was all around her that she couldn’t place no matter how she tried. The powerful, territorial scent of a type of Pokémon she had never encountered before was strong in the background of everything; they would be the owners of the den she was in, then.

Taste: there was nothing much to report, just a peculiar sourness on her tongue that reminded her of a bitter orange berry she had eaten once.

Finally, sight. Enya cracked open her eyes, and Mother’s blue face and white head feathers dominated her vision. She flinched at the fury in the Dragonair’s scarlet eyes and scrunched her own eyes shut again, hoping against hope that Mother would change her mind about being mad.

The Eevee waited a few breaths and peeked again. Mother’s face hadn’t moved away, but her expression had hastily rearranged itself into something less threatening. Enya groaned and rolled on to her stomach, feeling an ache in her back and forelimbs and a sharp tugging on her chest.

“It’s all right,” she mumbled into her front paws, resigned. “You can put your angry face back on. I know I did something bad.”

“No,” Mother said sharply. “You did not do something bad. You did something bad and _stupid_. You know that Kindle is barely able to care for you when he is awake, so you take it upon yourself to wander off _as he sleeps_?”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Father interjected, shoving Mother’s face aside before swiftly shielding his hands behind his back; the sudden brightness of his light orange belly made Enya’s eyes water, and she blinked several times as the den came into focus. Where _was_ she?

Mother hissed and flowed around to the base of Enya’s – well, she didn’t know what it was, exactly, though currently she was thinking of it as a nest – the thing in which Enya was lying. The Dragonair wound herself neatly at the end of the nest and stared unblinking at both the Eevee and Father. “Fine,” she snapped, the thick muscles of her body twisting like sinew as she tensed. “Nothing is ever your fault, Kindle. I made a mistake.”

“No, I’m not saying I didn’t –” Father made an exasperated noise and rubbed the back of his neck. “Never mind. Forget about us, for the moment.” He turned to Enya and ran a claw carefully over her head and down her spine, gently tucking her ears back. His voice was as soft as his gesture, but it had a similar core of danger all the same. “What were you thinking, Enya?”

“I was, um.” The kit tried to answer him, she really did, but there was something rather more pressing to her than giving her parents an answer they probably wouldn’t like. “Where are we?”

Mother seemed to disagree with her priorities. “Do not evade his question, little one,” she growled, the ire in her words softened by the endearment at the end. “Why did you run off, and why did you fight that human?”

“I _didn’t_ run off, and I didn’t fight him!” Enya protested, her own question placed to the side for now by pique. A stunned second later, a snarl ripped from Mother’s mouth and the acrid smell of smoke became prevalent; the Eevee looked to Father and saw thick black plumes rising from his nostrils even as he took deep, calming breaths. Bewildered, the kit looked from one of her parents to the other and tried to figure out what she had done to make them so much angrier.

Mother snapped after another moment and sprang up to be snout-to-snout with Father. “Now may I, great leader?” she asked, each word choked out as if it hurt her.

Father looked little better, clenching his fists and meeting Mother’s gaze without drawing back. “I’ll help you,” he ground out in an undertone. “Is that what human children learn now, to attack wild Pokémon who don’t fight back?”

“I did fight back,” Enya squeaked indignantly, offended that her parents thought her so incapable.

Gale’s sharp eyes flashed over to the kit, who fought not to shiver, and the Dragonair in a frighteningly level voice said, “You just said that you did not fight him.” Her tone turned icy. “Do not lie to me or to Kindle. You are better than lies.”

“I fought the male human’s Pokémon,” Enya stammered, large ears flicking nervously. “Not _him_. Mirage said that only humans fight humans and that they do a better job than we ever could, so we just fight other Pokémon instead.”

Father blinked twice and groaned, releasing a lungful of smoky air and closing his eyes. He gradually relaxed and then pushed Mother back into her coiled position; she didn’t go willingly but seemed content to just snap at his fingers before calming again. “But why,” the Charizard sighed wearily after he’d stopped leaking smoke with every breath, “did you fight at all? Why didn’t you run?”

“I…I couldn’t.” Enya kneaded the nest beneath her paws and sat tidily in the center of it, feeling proud of her accomplishment even as a harsh throb began in her chest; she peered curiously and with some trepidation at the area and tried to make sense of what she saw: a patch of baldness framing a long, thin cut that was held shut with something shiny. “I wanted to, at first, before the human sent out his Pokémon. But then I just got this rush and this feeling that I could do anything and I couldn’t stop battling until I was beaten.” Her fur was standing up and her green eyes were wide with remembered thrill.

Father gave that a few moments’ thought and shook his head. “Go on, then,” he rumbled in his deepest voice, the one of forced calm. “Who did you fight?”

Enya perked up. Father didn’t sound terribly mad anymore, just a bit frustrated, and a quick glance at Mother revealed that she wasn’t looking actively hostile. Good signs, overall. “A round and red and white – Voltorb, I think? And a Mankey.”

“A Mankey.” It was Father who seemed to be choking on his words now.

“I think so.” The Eevee kit looked at her chest again; her only frame of reference was watching Mirage patch a rip in the human fabric bag using what the Kadabra had called a needle and a thread. Stitching, she’d said. Was Enya _stitched_? “Kind of white and hairy and really angry? Like Aunt Zap when I wake her up in the middle of the night, except Aunt Zap doesn’t actually attack me.”

The tip of Mother’s tail was suddenly smoothing the fur at the base of Enya’s spine. “Was it the Mankey that hurt you so much?” This version of Mother was what the kit was most used to – the Dragonair angry at someone else and not her – and she let out a mental sigh of relief at its return.

“I guess. The Voltorb didn’t actually get that many hits in.”

Father made an encouraging noise and gestured for the Eevee to continue. “Then tell us about what moves they used. Do you remember?”

Emboldened, Enya stood up and slowly swished her tail with excitement at the memory of the battle. “The Mankey used a move where he glared and I lost defense.”

“Leer.” Father supplied.

“And one where he kicked my legs out from under me.”

“Low Kick.” This time Mother spoke, so Enya turned her head toward her.

“And one where his hand _glowed_ before he hit me.”

“Karate Chop.” Father again. The Eevee turned back to him.

“And the Voltorb used Tackle, mostly, but it had this other move where it basically _screamed_ and it lowered my defense. That one was _awful_!”

Mother fluidly returned to Father’s side, carefully keeping an arm-length between them but settling close enough that Enya didn’t have to part her attention between her parents anymore. “That one is called Screech, little one.”

“Well, it was awful.”

An earsplitting roar abruptly split the tentative peace: an Aerodactyl’s battle call, as familiar to Enya as the sound of Father’s heartbeat. Father and Mother shifted their weights instinctively, eyes going hard, transforming without thought from the kit’s beloved parents into two fierce, battle-ready strangers. They terrified her for a heart-stopping moment: the hard lines of the Charizard’s muscles shimmering behind waves of heat, the thick strength seated in the statue-like loops of the Dragonair. But then her instincts caught up with her mind and the warm, antsy rush she remembered from her fight overtook her and she crouched in her nest with bared teeth and bristling fur.

She wished for big claws and flattened her ears.

A Gyarados’s bellow, high with fervor, joined in with the Aerodactyl’s continuing cry, and both voices began trading insults – very creative ones, Enya noted with interest – and what sounded like blows. The incoming supply of memorable expletives was cut off by Father’s hand smothering her ears – not to mention half of her face as well, but the Charizard couldn’t help the size of his hands – as he visibly dismissed the uproar outside as nothing but Uncle Torrent and Grandfather Zephyr getting up to no good.

Mother seemed to agree and spent her aggression with a Horn Attack aimed at the air above their heads before flicking her tail contemptuously, relaxing – at least, as much as she ever did.

The roars continued, though muffled by Father’s hand, and were punctuated by the sounds of rock striking scales and water gushing, but the Charizard looked determined to ignore them. He reluctantly uncovered Enya’s ears when the curses became indistinct and the attacks more pronounced, and shook his head. “Tackle and Screech are the two moves a Voltorb knows from birth,” he contributed faintly, trying to get the conversation back on track.

Mother scoffed, her natural irritation exasperated by the ruckus of Grandfather Zephyr and Uncle Torrent were making. “And how would you know that?”

“Oh, you weren’t there for the Vermilion Gym.” Father sounded mildly surprised, like he had forgotten, and for her part, Enya was stunned. It was hard for her to imagine a time when the group of Pokémon she considered her family didn’t include the Dragonair. “One of the trainers in the Gym had a couple Voltorb. We talked while… _our_ trainer…was busy looking for something in the trash cans.”

This was the first time Father had actually admitted to having had a trainer, much less doing something exciting like battling with him or her. It was enough to make Enya forget to ask what a Gym was.

A trainer! The idea of such a human really appealed to the Eevee, though for some reason she shuddered to think of having one herself. She would, she thought, almost rather _be_ a trainer than have one, which was absurd and yet there was something alluring about the whole concept. Shaking her own head in an unconscious imitation of her Father, she plowed on with all of the bravado of youth: “Yeah, well, I Tackled it and used Sand-Attack and jumped on it and smashed it into a tree!” She really was proud of that, despite everything.

(Enya double-checked her feelings on the matter, taking her parents’ reactions into account. No, still no regret.)

Father ruffled her head fur briskly and placed a claw under her chin, making her meet his eyes. “I’m still very disappointed by your choices, Enya. But good job.”

Mother’s praise was less forthcoming, in that it did not come at all. “Why did you wander off in the first place?” Her voice had gone cold again, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

Enya bared her teeth nervously as her ears lowered. Whether or not she regretted what she did, she didn’t want her parents to think poorly of her. “I was just going to get a Bubblebeam plant for Father’s wings.”

“My wings – _Enya_! The Bubblebeam plant doesn’t even grow here – it’s a southern flower! And my wings are fine now, look!” It was true; the Charizard straightened to his full height and extended his wings with a powerful thrust. He did not so much as wince and the membrane of his wings, usually the first bit of him to show pain, did not tremble. “I just needed a rest.”

“Oh.” Enya was quiet as she shrank into the folds of her nest.

Mother grew louder in response, probably to compensate. She shot forward belligerently and got nose-to-nose with Enya, whose tail could not physically have been tucked further between her legs. “You almost got yourself killed for that –”

Father grabbed for Mother’s snout with a panicked hand and snapped it shut, shoving her face down into the nest and away from the kit. The Dragonair thrashed violently and pummeled the Charizard with her tail, but with some effort he pinned her down with a foot and applied his other hand to her muzzle as well. “What Gale – erm, your Mother – is trying to say is that we don’t ever expect this to happen again.” He tried to smile reassuringly above the bucking dragon-type as he grappled with her, but it was really more of a grimace. “Do not wander off alone. Do not battle.”

Mother managed to wrest her head from Father’s grip and bit him sharply on his forearm – a clean bite, no blood or torn flesh, just some pain and a harsh warning against trying that again. She then breathed heavily for a moment, wide eyes darting from Father to Enya with something that looked like guilt as she spun herself into a tight coil, away from the both of them.

Enya felt strangely cold, despite the sunlight that bore down on her back. “But I –”

“Alone.” Father muttered, examining his bitten arm and gingerly poking at the punctures. “Do not battle _alone_ ; I want you to have supervision at all times.” He finally looked up and met Enya’s disbelieving gaze, expression warm and understanding. “But I won’t stop you from fighting.”

The kit gasped, her heart skipping a beat; through the sudden rush of blood in her ears, she barely heard the chaos outside coming to an end. “You won’t?”

“We won’t?” Mother’s voice was startlingly subdued but the distaste in it was evident.

“You heard her, Gale,” Father coaxed, looking for all the world as if the Dragonair hadn’t just introduced her fangs to his arm. Enya wanted to be like him, and the rest of her family, powerful enough to shrug off attacks like that. “Tell me you don’t get a battle rush, don’t crave those fights that last until you just can’t stand anymore. She’s a fighter – she always has been.” This last part was said with unusual emphasis and apparently meant something special to Mother, who closed her mouth on a snarl and just nodded brusquely.

“Fine,” she jeered. “It is not like she has been untrained so far. We must have a word with everyone about being a bit more subtle when disobeying us.”

Enya cringed despite the happiness bubbling in her chest and throat. “You knew about that?”

“Of course.” Father waved a hand casually. “You disappear at the same time Zephyr does – your Grandfather, who can’t stand to be alone?”

“You come back wet at the same time that Torrent comes back looking guilty?”

Father chuckled to himself, a good mood overcoming him; Enya was glad to hear it. “Connecting the dots didn’t take an Alakazam’s mind.”

The Eevee frowned. “Connecting the dots?”

“It’s a human phrase.” Father held out his hands and Enya readily stood up, having forgotten the pain in her chest and the fact that she was stitched. Wincing, she rubbed her face against the Charizard’s fingers and purred, not quite trusting herself to make the leap. The fire-type gave her a sad, sympathetic look and scooped her up gently, tucking her paws beneath her body to cradle her in the upside-down cage of his claws. “Figuring out that the others were training you wasn’t hard, Enya.”

Mother snorted delicately. “Yes, do keep that in mind next time you try to keep something a secret – make it more difficult for us to notice. It was a touch insulting.” She nuzzled the kit hesitantly, and when Enya didn’t flinch from the proximity, something that might be called a smile slipped onto the Dragonair’s face.

Enya felt warm and sore and loved and happy. And ragingly curious, since she’d already moved on, in the way of children everywhere, to the next topic. She fidgeted within Father’s hands, craning her neck to look around his shoulder at the den around her. It was truly boggling, this den, and Enya frankly had never been more bewildered in her whole (admittedly short) life.

She felt as though she were in a clearing, surrounded on all sides – including, to her shock, both above and below – by very thin, very closely growing trees. The light in the clearing was produced by two pale, blocky things hanging from the above-trees that made sounds like Aunt Zap’s electricity. Even disregarding the peculiar nest in which she had been, there were a number of bizarre objects for which she had absolutely no concept of purpose; everything was so angular, all boxy and sharp, and it all reeked, now that she was focusing on it, of the territorial scent of the unknown Pokémon.

A dozen questions chased each other through her head in a confusing rush, but the simplest one made it out of her mouth first. “Where am I?”

Father winced and gritted his teeth, his fingers accidentally tightening around the kit, but before he could even open his own mouth there came a slamming noise from behind him. Enya was about to ask to be placed on his shoulder so she could see, but then a creature came into view.

It was a _human_ , a female, with skin the warm brown color of Zap’s stripes and short white head fur. She smelled old; maybe even older than Grandfather Zephyr, who had known a thousand Pokémon in his time who were now long dead, but the false pelts she wore – her _clothing_ , reds and browns – did not cover forearms that were solid with muscle. This human was not frail with her age, and though she barely came up to Father’s shoulder, she held herself with the same air of danger Mother had.

Enya took all of this in within the span of a second, her widening eyes the only part of her that moved, and then she jolted like she’d been electrocuted, thrashing in Father’s hands despite the subsequent painful tugs in her stitched chest.

The Charizard held her even more tightly, curving one strong hand over her back to pin her down as cautiously as a Gyarados trying to pick a flower without breaking it. “It’s okay, Enya!” he hissed a little frantically. “Calm down! The human’s not going to hurt you!”

“As if I would let her,” Mother snarled, imposing herself without hesitation on the human’s personal space.

Enya stopped struggling in Father’s grip though she continued to positively vibrate in place, and squeaked out a plea to her Mother. “No! Don’t hurt her!” Both of her parents looked down at her, the Charizard with confusion and the Dragonair with disbelief. The female human just looked exasperated; not at all scared of Mother and only somewhat willing to wait before taking things into her own hands. “I’m not scared – I’m excited! Do you think she’d let me smell her?”

Father’s whole body fell into a slump like he’d just heard someone using Sing. “I’m much too old for this,” he muttered, placing Enya back into her nest and moving away; Mother let one last snarl rip and drew back to Father’s side, allowing the human to approach. “You are in a human den, Enya,” the Charizard finally explained. “This human’s name is Esther, and she’s going to help. Now be still and let her look at you.”

The old human – _Esther_ – advanced with brisk steps and plucked the Eevee up with thin, chilly fingers; they weren’t as large as Father’s, and the aged skin was strangely soft, but somehow they seemed to encompass her more fully. The kit was more than willing to trust herself to that practiced grasp and let the female handle her without a second thought.

Still, she was a kit, and furthermore, she was Enya. It wasn’t long before she began to squirm with enthusiasm, and whispered breathlessly to her hovering parents, “Father! It’s a really real human! Look!”

“Yes, I see her. She helped to heal you after your battle. Show your thanks and stop wiggling so much.”

Esther ran her finger down the bald patch on Enya’s chest, feeling the area where she was stitched, very careful but very firm all the same. The kit sniffed those hands eagerly when they lingered near her nose – this, then, was the source of the territorial scent in the human den, or at least a part of it. Enya didn’t have much experience in the matter, but she thought that the old human smelled like she was mated, like Aunt Zap and Grandfather Zephyr faintly did; so, her mate was probably somewhere around.

Unless he was dead. Esther really _was_ quite old.

“What kind of den? What is all this stuff?” Enya asked as the human released her body only to grab onto her forelimbs, which she stretched out and rotated to their limits. They were achy, especially when bent, but did not distract the Eevee from her endless array of questions in the least.

“This is a place where injured Pokémon can go to get help. This is all human stuff used for healing.”

Esther ran her fingers down Enya’s skull, spine, and ribs – it wasn’t unpleasant, but tickled too much to feel good – creating furrows in her fur that remained after the kit was finally released. The Eevee shook herself, only succeeding in making her pelt scruffier, and reared up to plant her front paws in Esther’s stomach, looking up at the human with delighted awe.

“Father,” she whispered. “Mother. I’m _touching a human_.”

“Very nice,” Mother said. She did not sound terribly impressed. Father echoed her vaguely.

“ _We’re making eye contact._ ”

Suddenly, Esther pursed her lips and stuck her hands onto her hips with the quick movements of someone who did that often. She opened her mouth, revealing a set of not very frightening teeth, and spoke with a voice that Enya thought suited her perfectly; it was like a march, each word precise and no-nonsense.

Unfortunately, the words themselves were actual nonsense. Complete gibberish. Enya had never been so confused in her life, including that time when a Zubat had hit her with a Supersonic. Esther turned to Father and Mother, arms still akimbo, and babbled on for a few more seconds before stalking out of the den into a larger one and swinging a barrier of sorts out behind her as she left so that the two dens were separated from each other.

The kit stood, stunned, in her nest, ears and tail low. “Is…is she crazy?” she asked, almost scared to hear the answer. The first human she met tried to capture her, and now the second one was crazy!

Father, who had been staring after Esther with a look of shock on his face, started at Enya’s question and quickly adopted a comforting expression. “No, little one,” he chuckled. “She’s not crazy. Just human.”

“Do they all talk nonsense, then? I thought maybe the male human I fought was just using battle words I didn’t know.”

“No – humans speak their own language, Enya.” Mother moved to a hole in the side of the den, through which Enya could see trees; the Dragonair looked out briefly and then returned to the kit. “You just cannot understand her because humans use lots of individual words to say what they mean, and Pokémon use one word and the inflection of their voices to say what they mean.”

Father lifted Enya from the nest without her having to ask, letting her rest in his cupped palms again. “The humans are all about what they say, while Pokémon are about how they say it. We use our species names, because that’s what’s easiest to pronounce, but if I could wrap my mouth around another word I could say anything, any word, with the right inflection and you would still be able to understand me. Understand me?”

“I…think so. Mostly. Inflection is a big word.”

Father laughed, his humor and bouncing hands making the Eevee giggle as well, even though she didn’t really get the joke. “Don’t worry about it, Enya. Just know she’s not crazy.”

“You and Mother can understand her though,” the kit prompted. It was almost, but not quite, a question – Enya knew what she saw, even if it didn’t make sense, and Father had reacted to the human’s speech.

“Wild Pokémon can learn the language of humans, of course,” Mother sniffed, bringing her head closer to Father’s so Enya could see her without turning. “It is difficult, even with a teacher, but not impossible. However, Kindle and I and everyone else on the team understand the language because we are captured, and Pokéballs are translators.”

Enya’s eyes grew wide, the bright green reflecting the square lights overhead as she looked up at the Dragonair, who lowered herself to be level with the kit. “You mean, if I’d been captured, I would’ve just _known_ the human language? Wow!”

Father and Mother shared matching grimaces and argued something between each other with a few head twitches. The Charizard sighed, conceding defeat in whatever battle had been waged, and nuzzled Enya lightly with his warm snout. “Yes, little one, but _please_ don’t get any ideas. Yes, there are lots of benefits to being captured, of course there are; it’s why we allow ourselves to be caught in a lot of cases. There’s adventure, companionship, new and better skills, faster growth, an entire world before you, and a wonderful human to share it with.” He rested his chin on Enya’s head and the kit pushed up against him encouragingly. “But don’t go looking to get caught, please. I couldn’t bear it. Being a captured Pokémon is fantastic, but…”

Father couldn’t find the words to finish; closing his eyes, he turned his face from Mother in an attempt to salvage his pride, but she didn’t scoff. Instead, she hesitantly brushed his shoulder with her tail and completed his sentence: “It can break your heart, Enya. It really can.”

A familiar crackling noise was their only warning before a surge of electricity snapped and the barrier between the dens slammed open. Zap stood in the larger den, her fur sticking up everywhere with uncontrolled static and a frantic light in her eyes. The Raichu wasn’t panicked, though – that wasn’t her style at all – she was just impossibly grim.

“This cuddle-fest is canceled, Pokémon. Get your collective tails outside immediately.”

Kindle held Enya to his chest, and fanned out his wings protectively, shielding her from the unknown threat. “What’s happened, Zap?”

"I went out to see if the boys wanted to play some more and – _lightning_ , there’s no time to explain. Just follow me. Take the kit. Get Mirage on your way out.”

* * *

Uncle Torrent had once told Enya that he had never fainted in battle in his life. Caught by his trainer just days after hatching, he was painstakingly trained as a Magikarp and never left to fight on his own; when he evolved into Gyarados, he became practically unstoppable. His showing in the Pokémon League had earned him the nickname The Invincible Dragon, something Mother still resented, and he was doing his best to keep his record clean.

Uncle Torrent lay, unmoving, on the ground. He was crumpled in the lee of an outcropping, his head mashed into the earth and his back half running up the stone like a thick, blue vine. All around the rock for some distance was nothing but scrub bush; the Gyarados was in the perfect place to see without being seen, or at least that had been the intent. It had become the perfect place to collapse without being found.

Enya seriously considered lying down and burying her face in her paws until the world was right again and Uncle Torrent had not fainted, but suspected that she would be waiting for a long time. Instead, she opted to bury her face in Aunt Zap’s belly fur, which carried enough electrical charge to warm the kit and make her fur rise. It felt almost like an embrace.

Father had set her down a good distance away from Uncle Torrent, almost as soon as he’d seen the unconscious water-type. After tersely ordering Aunt Zap to stay with the Eevee kit and to _for cinder’s sake keep her out of trouble_ , the Charizard had proceeded to examine the Gyarados thoroughly.

It took a powerful Pokémon using a powerful, type-effective move to crack a Gyarados’s armor, and Uncle Torrent’s head scales were shattered like an acorn stepped on by a Nidoking. There were no other injuries that Father could see. It had been a one-hit knock out.

Enya wondered how she could go from feeling so happy and safe to feeling like the world had turned upside down without anyone noticing. Even Mother was visibly alarmed, flitting around as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she should be doing, and that was almost more frightening than the actual scenario.

What made the scenario actually worse was the fact that Grandfather Zephyr was nowhere to be found. Not a mark of his talon or scrape of his wingtips in the dirt. Not even drag marks, but how else was one to move an enormous, ancient Pokémon made of rock? It wasn’t like the Aerodactyl’s Pokéball was floating around freely; Mirage checked. It was still in the bag.

Father was frustrated and restless; the whole area was damp and muddy and washed entirely clean of scents. Someone had cut rings – knife work, too thin and precise to be a Pokémon’s – in the trunks of every bush nearby, slashing the vessels that transported nutrients and water from the roots to the rest of the plant; the soundless but very real agony of the dying vegetation drowned out any residual psychic readings Mirage may have been able to trace.

Uncle Torrent had been knocked out, Grandfather Zephyr was missing, and Enya was quietly falling to pieces.

She wished she hadn't woken up.

* * *

 Green had not seen her bed in days. It was more of a cot, really; a standard military-issue cot stuck into a corner of her office, and it was usually when she started thinking of it as an actual bed that she needed it the most. “You’d better have a damn good reason for calling me right now, White.” The cool door handle turned slick under her heated palm and the click-pop of teeth being ground together started up in a steady rhythm into her communicator.

Had it been Yellow who disturbed her on her way to a few blissful hours of rest, he probably would have unwisely chosen to council Green on her nervous habits; but then again, Yellow was currently settling in for a long haul in a Team Rocket hospital. The bones of the feet were ever so troublesome when shattered. Besides, White was much too smart to offer his boss unsanctioned advice, even if he were inclined to give it. He was there to do a job.

White’s fingers tapped out their own staccato beat onto his desk, feeling the little whorls of knots sticking out of the cheap wooden surface. “Yes, sir. I do. _Damn_ good.” His other hand was clenched tightly around his communicator as though he could convey his urgency through his grip. The stylistic grooves in the sides of the comm device would be imprinted in the fleshy parts of his hand soon, but between the rush of blood in his ears as his heart sped up and the quiet on the other end of the line (it wasn’t an outright dismissal), he didn’t care.

“What, then?”

His words were as furtive and quick as his fingers. “We assumed Lyle's Pokémon split shortly after losing her, because that's the usual pattern for abandoned Pokémon, but I had a hunch and it paid off. I adjusted our scanners to alert when the species names of three or more of her Pokémon were mentioned in conjunction.”

That got Green’s attention even though most of it was still on her bed: the cool sheets, the two thin pillows, the promising hours of oblivion that would probably do something for the headache behind her right temple. She let her hand drop from the door handle to knock as a fist against her leg, the rough fabric of her pants chafing her abraded knuckles. “Interesting. Any hits?”

“Not for a while, and then out of the blue _all six_ of them get called out.” Triumph was almost tangible in his voice even over the tinny communicator link. White was not one for false modesty. “A rerun of a trashy news show in Cerulean.”

“Go on.”

Metal wheels squeaked as White pushed his rolling chair back from his desk, knocking over a pile of books and crushing discarded sheafs of paper. One piece of paper was sorted out from the rest, picked up and smoothed out. “There’s a video. It’s a bit long; basically, a kid’s filming himself battling a wild Eevee, beats it, and all of a sudden powerful Pokémon – Lyle’s Pokémon – come pouring out of the woodwork. Kid panics, of course, and runs. Lyle’s Pokémon pick up the Eevee and do a runner themselves. End tape.”

Green’s hand returned to the door handle to her office. Her mind returned to her bed. “Take a team. Tear Cerulean apart if you must.”

“I’m a scientist, sir. Not a field agent.” A sigh rattled the communicator’s speakers. “Well, not a real one, at least. I'm not licensed for missions outside of Scarlet City.”

Green was in a moderately good mood thanks to the news, and a bit giddy with tiredness anyway, so she just sighed in reply instead of snarling at him. “Congratulations, you’ve been promoted. Take a team. Find her. And be cautious. If her Pokémon have stuck together this long, they're even more dangerous than we thought.”

“With all due respect, sir, if Lyle is the Eevee, she looks pretty bad off after being beaten in this video. Wouldn’t it be easier to just let her die?” White’s voice offered up no resistance to Green’s order even as he questioned it, a trick he’d learned while still a Rocket Grunt.

“Not at this point. Ruby’s modified serum is…well, it has a somewhat different effect than the serums you're used to."

"What kind of different effect? Her proposal was classified and she's been playing everything close to her chest."

"That would be on a need-to-know basis. Hence the classification. However, shockingly, you've been doing a good enough job that soon enough you may need to know. But for now, just accept that I hate variables, so. Take. A. Team. And. Get. Lyle.” A door opened and slammed shut just before the link to Green’s communicator was severed with a low beep.

_That many periods in one sentence can’t be good for your brain_ , White mused as he pulled up personnel files on his computer to begin assembling a team, but he kept the thought to himself. After all, he wasn’t Yellow.


	10. The Illusion of Control

“If you hold on to the handle, she said, it's easier to maintain the illusion of control. But it's more fun if you just let the wind carry you.”

* * *

Esther couldn't have said she was too surprised when she returned from fetching Gene and found that the Pokémon were missing. She gave the Center a cursory once-over, of course, and peered near-sightedly out of the windows, but didn't expect to find them anywhere nearby. If her husband's expression was any indication of his thoughts, he wasn't particularly shocked either.

There was an abundance of studies to prove it, but neither healer needed evidence to convince them that captured Pokémon tended to grow similar to their trainers as they spent time together. And Lyle's team – of course they were hers, only the best of trainers could go missing for a month and have their Pokémon continue to cooperate with one another – had been with her for years. Lyle herself was a lovely child, if a bit sharp-tongued, but you could just tell that she didn't handle surprises well: she was clever and strategic and had no patience for being caught off guard.

So it was perfectly logical for the girl's Pokémon to have bolted from the Center after hearing such news as Esther had delivered. That was her own fault, the old woman recognized; she had spoken unthinkingly out of shock, not considering of what Lyle's Pokémon would make of it.

But still. It was a bit rude. Both Esther and Gene had taken a risk, helping obviously trainer-less Pokémon as powerful as Lyle's without supervision, and received no thanks? Esther wanted to grumble a comment about the youth of today but refrained; she wasn't that old yet.

"Kids today have no manners." Gene had no such reservations. He had his arms crossed sullenly, like a small child denied a treat, his nightgown buttoned unevenly and his hair askew. Catching the gleam of coins on the counter out of the corner of his eye, he nodded approvingly. "Eh, I guess they're all right. At least they understand the concept of payment. The young ones never do."

"For goodness' sake, dear. If you're going to grumble like an old man, at least have the decency not to look like a child woken up in the middle of the night." Esther quickly evened the sides of her husband's clothing and made a half-hearted attempt to tame his hair. "Besides, it's largely my fault. I'm certain I panicked them before I went to fetch you. They all seemed to really care for that Eevee, and I wasn't exactly tactful when I told them what I saw."

"It just doesn't make sense, Esther," Gene sighed, wrapping an arm around her waist and leading her to the largest armchair in the room. He sat, pulling her down onto his lap. "The kit is ordinary – we were finger-deep into her _thoracic cavity_ last night and saw nothing strange. We pulled a piece of bone from her lung. She had a pneumothorax! We had to remove air from between her ribs!"

Esther stopped him by grabbing his gesticulating hands and holding them firmly within her own. "If this is all leading up to questioning whether I really did see what I told you, then save your breath, you old bat." The look she gave him was scathing and only a man who had been exposed to it for decades could have held back a flinch. She didn't get off of his lap, though, or remove her fingers from where they were entwined with his. "You know as well as I how long I was an army medic. Lives were on the line if I made a judgment error, even more so than for regular medics." The old woman walked her fingers up the buttons on her husband's chest. "I don't. Make. Mistakes. That kit was –"

There was a knock at the front entrance.

Gene chuckled and cupped his wife's cheek softly. "Well, you know what they say. There's no rest for the weary."

Esther pulled away with a smile and stood, pulling Gene up after her. "Back when I was in the Saffron College of Aid and Diagnosis to prep for medical school, we used to joke that the acronym really stood for 'sleep comes after death.'"

Her husband grinned, laugh lines slipping easily onto his face. "I seem to remember you having quite a few sleepless nights with a certain handsome Pokémon Center nurse."

Esther tried to scowl but her lips curved up in spite of herself as she removed his wandering hands. "Oh, do control yourself. You were a kennel-cleaning lackey and you know it. Heaven only knows what I saw in you."

Whoever was at the door knocked again, this time adding a tentative, "Hello?"

Gene took advantage of Esther's distraction and kissed her. "We have company," she hissed. "We have a _job_."

"How pedestrian," the old man grumbled, pecking her on the cheek.

"It's unlocked!" Esther called over her shoulder to the front door. She hooked her foot behind Gene's knees and pulled, spinning him around as his legs buckled. After helping him regain his balance, she pushed him lightly toward the stairs. "I'll handle this. Go put on real clothes."

Recognizing a lost cause when he saw one, Gene shuffled to the steps and made his way up them with surprising speed for a man who just yesterday had claimed that the state of his joints would cripple a Primeape.

The front door opened with an unpleasant, drawn-out creak, and a head poked around the threshold tentatively. It was a dark-skinned man with a broad, pleasant face who smiled gently at Esther when she approached. His voice, when he spoke, had a lilting accent. "Hello! Sorry to disturb so early on a weekend, but I'm with the Cerulean City Police Department, and we need to know if you've seen an Eevee kit recently."

Esther was many things, but 'gullible' did not top the list and 'suspicious' was pretty far up. "Is this how the CCPD intends to dress its officers from now on? You look like a Team Rocket reject." The three months she spent in prison after attempting to rescue an abused Clefable from a rather influential family in town might have had some bearing on her attitude.

The man crossed his arms self-consciously in front of his black t-shirt and eyed his white pants and utilitarian black boots. Innocuous, professional clothing, but hardly the royal blue protect-and-serve uniform of which Officer Jenny was so fond. "I'm off-duty at the moment, ma'am," he said stiffly. "This is an urgent situation and I was closest to you."

The old woman crossed her arms and stared down the man at her front door. Everyone know that Beedrill were the most territorial creatures in the world – children who lived near forests had a warning committed to memory before they even learned to speak: "Avoid the hive, stay alive. Throw a stone, you won't come home" – but Esther may well have given the species a run for its money at that moment. "Let's see some identification then, _officer_."

"Right, of course." The stranger started, slipping his hand into a pants pocket and producing a thin leather wallet. "There you are." He flipped open with a practiced flick of the wrist and let Esther's critical scrutiny hover over it for a few seconds.

Try as she might, the old woman could not find a flaw in either the man's identification card or his tarnished bronze badge. Both were worn with use and the man maintained his quiet, friendly smile. "Fine. What did you want, again? Officer…Bhattacharyya? Seriously?" Her pronunciation was impeccable.

"I'm afraid so." The man – Jay Bhattacharyya, according to his ID, which featured the picture of a much younger man than one in front of her (who had the same wide features but sported significantly more worry lines) – tucked the wallet back into his pocket and cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Eevee kit? Been in here? Recently?"

"Yes."

Bhattacharyya sighed shortly through the nose and his smile finally tightened with suppressed nerves. Good. Esther liked her law enforcement how she liked her telemarketers: eager to leave her alone. She wished she were wearing something more intimidating and worthy of battle than a red button-up, khaki pants, and Velcro shoes, but she had forced retreats with less.

After a further moment of uneasy silence made it clear that the old woman had no intention of volunteering more information, the police officer prompted her to continue, terse but perfectly polite. _Who what when where why_?

"My husband and I. Eevee kit. Last night and well into this morning. This Pokémon Center. Because the kit was injured." It wasn't obstruction of justice, strictly speaking, if justice simply wasn't asking the right questions.

It seemed like justice might be about to ask the right questions – and by "justice," Esther meant Bhattacharyya, though at her age it would probably be best to tone down the metaphor usage – when he was interrupted by a shout that spiraled down the stairwell. It was Gene, freshly dressed in bright green medical scrubs that had seen better days, coming to the rescue of whoever had incensed his wife this time.

"Is he here about that kit?" the old man asked as he descended. With hair pulled back into a neat bun and practical off-white sneakers on his feet, Gene looked downright reputable. "It was tragic, I'm telling you."

"Tragic?" It was fortunate that the policeman's attention snapped from wife to husband so quickly because otherwise he may have seen confusion wipe over Esther's face.

Gene reached the ground floor and reached out to shake Bhattacharyya's hand. "Oh, yes. No one likes it when a patient dies on the table, but it's worse when it's just a baby. We worked on her all night long but she passed earlier this morning."

The younger man blinked, expression decidedly neutral. "Died?"

"Are you a Ditto?" Esther snapped, recovering and stepping to her husband's side. "Yes, she died. You think we like reliving our failures?" The _moron_ at the end of her sentence was silent but heavily implied.

Bhattacharyya's neutrality dipped momentarily into irritation, a fact that Gene chose to be cheerfully oblivious to as he put one hand on his wife's back and clapped the policeman's shoulder with the other. "Oh, let the man be, love. He'll leave when he gets what he came for, eh?" Both hands came up in front of his chest to steeple dramatically. "The Eevee was such a small thing, and she had been well and truly beaten. Left on our doorstep in the dead of night with some coins, if you believe it!" Another shoulder clap. It was a very _Gene_ thing to do. "I was honestly surprised she lasted as long as she did. Why are you looking for her?"

Bhattacharyya cleared his throat and finally moved. He tapped his wallet through his pocket with two fingers as he took a step back and ducked his head. "That's confidential." His attention was fading fast. Or, not fading, but moving elsewhere. "I could lose my badge if I told you."

"And that would be a terrible pity."

The policeman didn't even have a glance to spare to acknowledge Esther's dry sarcasm. He barely had the time to give a halfhearted salute as he walked out the building.

"What was that all about?" Gene asked, stuffing his hands into his pockets and benignly ignoring the way the doors cracked as they were slammed shut.

"I could ask you the same."

"Oh, right, mine's more important!" Gene tried to point at his wife for emphasis but just managed some abortive jerks from within the scrub pockets. "Something's wrong with our security cameras outside. I can't focus them on anything."

Ever suspicious, Esther frowned at the splintering door. "Acid?"

"Maybe. Or it could just be a malfunction. _And_ our phone line is out."

"How highly coincidental. You think Officer Ditto was involved?"

"I don't know." Gene shrugged, apparently having lost the urge to free his hands. "It's just a bad feeling. Something feels wrong." He surveyed the quiet Pokémon Center helplessly: the ramshackle lobby, the three small rooms off to the side. The window that allowed sunlight to shine on the little mess of a bed in which the kit had been sleeping. The same locale he had been taking in every day for a couple decades now. Unkempt and desperately in need of repair, but probably never going to get any because they weren't exactly the richest people around and spent their money mostly on equipment and medicine. The important things.

No, wait. Something was out of place. The back window. "Look." He wrested his hands out of his pockets and pointed.

"I wear bifocals, Gene. I can't see anything." Esther dutifully squinted at the glass anyway and elbowed her husband lightly in the gut. "No, that's a lie. I see black and white blobs."

Gene's voice was strained as he rotated their positions, placing himself between her and the window. "Close enough. You just missed out on the big red R's and the shadowy ranks of aggressive, muscle-y Pokémon along the tree line."

What followed was a rapid exchange of hushed words.

"What? No! Team Rocket? Here?"

"Team Rocket yes here, Esther. And…the policeman is with them."

"Well, this is embarrassing. Did we ever actually build that back door we've been talking about for twenty years?"

"I thought it was your eyes that were going, not your memory, love."

"Fine, stupid question. Better question: how surrounded are we?"

"Pretty damn surrounded; I can see even more of them through the front window now. What's the plan?"

"What makes you think I have a plan?"

"You always have a plan!"

Esther did not have a plan and informed Gene of this by punching him solidly in the arm.

He responded by wrapping his arms around her and cradling his face in the curve between her neck and shoulder. "You know I love you, right?"

"Of course. And I love you." She wormed her arms up from where they were pinned between their chests and curled them around her husbands neck. Her nose pressed into his collarbone. He smelled of detergent and citrus.

"Good. That's good."

"Why are we professing our love?"

"Well, not to be an alarmist, because you know how I hate to kick up a fuss, but do you smell smoke?"

"…I can't believe we bought that x-ray projector instead of cell phones. Remind me to never do that again."

"Of course, love."

* * *

It was said that when a Ninetails died, it burned with the heat of a star to make sure that no one would ever touch its tails, even in death. While this, strictly speaking, was true, it would have to have been an exceptionally little star because the worst of the heat tended to extend only to about fifteen yards around the dead Pokémon. But anything caught within that radius would burn as though it were standing on the surface of the sun.

This natural phenomenon had caused quite a few problems over the years – accidental deaths and burns, property damage, and so on – but no one ever managed to come up with a better solution than an extremely well-protected containment shelter where trainers were required by law to send their Ninetails to live out their last days when death was imminent. Hardly a perfect system, but there was no way to stop biology from running its course.

If you saw a Ninetails that looked ill or injured, beginning to sizzle with heat, you threw a Potion at it and ran as fast as you could.

Or, if you were Team Rocket, you captured it, leaving it in the stasis of a Pokéball until you needed it, to commit arson without being caught. It would be a tragedy, of course, but not a crime. There was no murder when the weapon was a star.

* * *

Now _this_ was a proper human building (a proper _laboratory_ , according to Mother). It wasn't made of trees at all, but of stone and grey sunlight in stretches as far as the eye could see in either direction. Father had told Enya to stay in the sling, nestled against the safety of Mirage's chest, but that had lasted all of five minutes after landing. She stuck close to the Kadabra, of course, because she didn't want to bring the wrath of her family down on herself again quite yet, but even the loss of Grandfather Zephyr couldn't dampen her curiosity for too long.

Well.

Maybe she stayed a little closer to Mirage than she might have before, and if the psychic-type noticed she chose not to mention it.

A faint whirring sound to Enya's left caught her attention – like the wings of Beedrill in the distance – and, casting a glance after Mirage to make sure she wasn't going anywhere, the Eevee crouched down and crawled toward the noise. Thick grass tickled her nose and left little seeds in her fur, and almost concealed a small dark circle of something cold and hard that, when she got close enough, jerked forward to bump against her nose. Within the large circle were several others, each smaller than the last, which spun independently and whined and reflected the Eevee's image back to her. A red dot blinked in the center of the circles; Enya cautiously batted at it with her paw, and the device, human and baffling, then settled back into the grass. It looked a little like the thing the human boy near the woods had held while he battled her.

Well. Father _had_ said that this human was somewhat strange.

_"I want to go see Bill," Aunt Zap said, the first to finally speak after it had sunk in that Grandfather Zephyr was not going to be easily found. Uncle Torrent had been returned to his Pokéball and carefully stored in the human bag Mirage carried on her back, and all signs pointed toward useless sitting about until someone broke the silence. "He has a translator and a telephone."_

_Father started with a mixture of guilt and disbelief. "Bill's a little bit psychotic."_

_"It's genius psychosis, it doesn't count."_

_"He tried to shoot you when you got too close to his experiments."_

_"Hey, fair play. I'm a dangerous meddler."_

After a few moments of heated debate from the tree line closest to the human Bill's laboratory and furthest from the city of Cerulean itself, Father, Mother, and Aunt Zap had made a simple plan and put it to action before anyone could change their minds. They sneaked into the building from a rear entrance, as much as a Charizard, Dragonair, and Raichu could sneak anywhere, leaving a door with slightly damaged hinges leaning crookedly in its frame in their wake and disappearing from sight quickly into the shadowed hall beyond the door. Their group was so small now, with Grandfather Zephyr taken and Uncle Torrent stuck in his Pokéball until it was safe enough to revive him.

_"And we can't find someplace safe and wait for Torrent to wake up because?" Father kept fingering the small red and white ball he wore around his neck. He'd explained to Enya that going into a Pokéball was like inhaling in one place and then exhaling in an entirely new place once released, no matter how much time had passed outside the device – Uncle Torrent wouldn't get any better or worse as long as he was safe within his ball. But he also wouldn't play with her in the river or let her practice her Tackles against his soft tail until he was better, so he may as well not have been tucked into the depths of Mirage's bag in a Pokéball at all. He was missing just as much as Grandfather Zephyr was._

_"Because even I'm getting the impression that it's not going to be very safe for long no matter where we go," Aunt Zap responded curtly, "which means you realized that a long time ago." The Raichu had left Enya in the safety of Mother's coiled tail and efficiently maneuvered her way onto Father's left shoulder so that she could tweak his horns whenever she thought it appropriate. Which she did at this point. "We're on someone's radar for some reason, and that's probably not a good thing."_

_Father attempted to buck the Raichu off and only managed to make her cling harder to his horns. "And you – ow, hey! Watch it – think Bill is the solution to that? What about Oak? What about the plan?"_

_"Professor Oak is many days of flight away." Aunt Zap relinquished her hold on Father's horns and used his head as a springboard to leap into the lower branches of a tree. She then climbed higher in a series of short jumps so that she could gesture with appropriate drama toward Cerulean City, which twinkled in the not-so-distant distance like sunlight on a moving river. "Bill is so nearby I could drop lightning on his doorstep if I wanted to."_

_"And what about the CCPD? All it would take is one phone call."_

_The Raichu shrugged, the casualness of which was undermined by the intense disapproving look she was directing at Father. "On a phone that could just as easily be used to call Professor Oak without several days of interminable flight."_

_"Yeah, okay, but are you forgetting about the crazy?"_

Enya couldn't hear it, but a high-frequency alarm had been set off the moment the back door of the lab had been opened without the proper entry code. (Bill's reputation in town as a paranoid mad scientist was well-earned; he was a genius, to be sure, and no one was eager to malign the man who invented the PC box system of Pokémon storage and transfer, but it couldn't be said that he was particularly stable.) The alarm was short-range, extending only a quarter mile or so from its point of origin; Bill initially tried to extend the signal to the Cerulean City Police Department, but they had politely destroyed their receiver after the fourth time the scientist tripped his own alarm system by accident.

To adjust to the absence of immediate backup from the CCPD, Bill then installed an elaborate system of pipes and sensors that would flood a breached section of hallway with a subtle catalepsy-inducing gas, and took to wearing a gas mask at all times. Despite its irrelevancy, since no one bar a confused pizza delivery boy had ever tried to enter the laboratory uninvited, it was an effective system of defense – of course it was; Bill created it. Even Zap, with her exceptional senses as a Raichu, would have had to strain to detect either the alarm or the gas.

_"No, Zap is right." Mother spoke for the first time, glowering at Father and Aunt Zap but passing over Mirage since she was pretending to meditate again and it would have been a wasted effort._

_Father started in shock. "Come again?"_

_The thought appeared to disgust the Dragonair. "Do not make me repeat myself."_

_"No, no, please repeat yourself." From her perch in the canopy, Aunt Zap looked as though she had been given a gift. "I want to bask."_

_"You: shut up." The delight failed to fall from the Raichu's face, and Mother growled, turning aggressively toward Father, her curled tail in which Enya sat, observing what was left of her family, swinging gently below her. "You: listen, even if Bill is completely mad, we do not need him to accomplish what we must do. We just need his equipment. It is worth the risk if we can keep him under control."_

_"You're not implying that we kill him if he won't help?"_

_There was a flash of scarlet as Mother rolled her eyes. "Of course not."_

_"How…strangely benevolent…of you." Father placed a tentative hand on Mother's flank, just above Enya's ears._

_"Do not wet yourself, twister-brain." The Dragonair shimmied midair and flicked his hand off. "I am just very aware of the fact that we do not need the kind of attention a murder would bring down upon us. Merely knocking him out should suffice."_

_Father flexed his hand unconsciously, consistently surprised on some level when Mother didn't leap on the chance to hurt him. "Ah. Comforting."_

Mirage was on edge. Enya could tell. Something was bothering her; not something distinct enough that she could act on it, because if that were the case she would have already acted, but something subtle that she couldn't quite place her golden finger on. The psychic-type blinked slowly, clenching her eyes shut tightly at the moment of closure and scrunching her face, holding that position until, with a sigh, she relaxed and resumed casually hovering a foot or so above the earth. For someone who was meant to be guarding a kit, the Kadabra was paying remarkably little attention to Enya overall.

"Is something wrong?" Enya asked tentatively after the Kadabra had opened her eyes.

Mirage's answer was short and predictable. "Maybe." She twisted her wrist in a dismissive motion meant to persuade Enya that all was well – and probably, knowing Mirage, it also meant to tell her to slow down, child, have patience, etc. – but the kit could still read the tension in her frame and posture. The Kadabra was trying desperately to sense whatever it was that was making her uneasy before something bad happened. She hadn't been particularly comfortable with the mission from the start.

_"Mirage? You haven't said anything. I mean, we kind of expect you to be strong and silent, but you've got to have an opinion in that enormous brain of yours." Father was growing slightly desperate the more outnumbered he felt._

_The Kadabra, who had grown more and more willing to speak aloud as Enya grew older – perhaps conditioning, since it was poor form to ignore a kit and hope for it to accept silence as an answer – responded after a moment's thought. "I may not like the idea, but arguing is a waste of time. We have already made up our minds – even you, Kindle – to take a stupid risk in the hopes that something good will come of it." So saying, she turned her back on Father's sputtering._

_"I have not – you don't know – am I the only one who remembers how unpredictable he was? He thought E – our trainer was a spy," he snapped, growing louder as he spoke, "even after she saved him from his own experiments! He turned himself into a Pokémon just to see if he could! He_ t ried to shoot you _–"_

_"Shut up!" Aunt Zap hurled herself at Father's head from the tree; she missed her target in her haste but grabbed at his muzzle as she fell past, ending up hanging from it by one paw. "Backtrack: he turned himself into a Pokémon," she echoed, feeling the fire-types hands come up to brace her hind paws and heaving herself up to look him in the eye, "and more importantly, he turned himself back."_

_Mother froze, and then approached the two of them with curious thoughtfulness. "Well, now, that is an interesting point."_

_"Yeah, okay." Father unceremoniously dropped his hands and Aunt Zap landed heavily on the forest floor. He looked between Mother, Aunt Zap, and Mirage's back with defeat before glancing wistfully at Enya, who stared back with sad, bemused green eyes. "Okay. Let's go see Bill. Just don't expect him to welcome us."_

Within the walls of Bill's laboratory, the gas pipes and their operating systems were dutifully trying to do their jobs, and they would have succeeded if the gas tanks had been in place. But the defense room was currently in a state of disarray and each tank had been laid carefully on its side as far away from the ventilation pipes as possible. An urgent alert flashed on a large monitor in the room, intermittently shading everything red – the scattered sheaves of paper, the upturned desks and chairs, the scorch marks on the walls and machinery. Two smaller, secondary dialog boxes opened on top of the alert with live footage of a small Eevee and a Kadabra stationed outside of the lab; and a Charizard, Raichu, and Dragonair within. The same message blinked urgently on every screen in the entire building, doing its best to warn Bill about intruders.

It's always difficult to warn someone who's not there.

"Not there" being such a subjective descriptor, it should be specified that he was, in fact, still inside of his laboratory. He was simply not in a room with a monitor, and even if that were not the case, he would not have been paying close attention to it. His not insignificant consideration was trained upon his first intruder of the day, who had broken in through the ceiling above the defense room a couple of hours earlier, dismantled the scientist's defense system by dint of laying waste to it, and then proceeded to tie him to a chair in a dark room in his own lab.

For his part, Bill couldn't decide if he wanted to feel triumphant, frightened, or indignant. Triumphant because it's not paranoia if someone really is trying to get to you; frightened because he was tied hand and foot with expert knots to his favorite rolling chair; and indignant because didn't this intruder have any respect for the science he was wantonly ruining?

Feeling, in the end, a sickening blend of those emotions, Bill thought about asking the man (who was gathering himself in the shadowed corner and consulting with a large, brutish Pokémon) who he was and what he was doing, just to complete the scene, but it was an unnecessary question and the scientist didn't really have the patience for that at the moment.

Everyone in Kanto could recognize Lance the Dragon Master in an instant.


	11. Growth Experiences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year? I know it's been like 3 years but I've gotten a degree and a job and stuff in the interim, so that's cool. I want to make a concerted effort to keep doing creative pursuits in my life, and this chapter has been sitting on my hard drive waiting to be finished since early 2016 so it seemed like a good place to start. Hope you enjoy!

 

"Maybe I don't want a Happy New Year, he said. Maybe I want an intense New Year with a lot of growth experiences  
  
& I had to admit I'd never thought of that"

* * *

"If we weren't hiding from the police right now, I would _so_ want to go get the police right now."  Zap had eventually decided that walking in the dark with nothing but a Charizard's tail flame was for humans and unfortunate Pokémon who didn't know Flash; her fur bristled with a gentle but radiant light.  The bits of corridor the three Pokémon could see at any given time were sterile and blank, maze-like.

The sound of Kindle's claws striking the linoleum with every echoing step was uncomfortably loud in the quiet dark of the laboratory.  The Charizard flinched with every step and tried to walk more gingerly, but all that accomplished was allowing Gale to take point in their formation.  "Talking about it's not going to make it any less creepy," he replied finally, terse, scanning the hall as he walked.

Zap, walking just behind Gale, doubled back to grab Kindle's dangling hand and climb up to perch on his shoulder.    "Seriously, all we need is some writing in blood on these unnervingly pristine white walls," she whispered into his ear.

A full-body shudder ran down Kindle, nearly dislodging his passenger.  "Would you _stop that_?"  He squinted at her through the brightness of her Flash.

"The walls will be a little bloodier in a minute," Gale hissed irritably, turning about abruptly and halting their progress, "if you two do not _shut up_."

The threat knocked Kindle and Zap into several minutes of silence, even after they started forward again.  The monochrome halls stretched before them – left turn, right turn, left, straight, left, ignoring the doors staggered every so often along the way with numeric panels and labels like "DANGER: RADIOLOGY TESTING" and sometimes simply a skull and crossbones, which got the point across just fine – following Zap's nose toward what she swore was the focal point of human scent in the laboratory.  Barring there actually being blood on the walls somewhere, that would be where they would find Bill.

The Pokémon turned yet another corner and the first flash of color took them all by surprise.  A threatening hiss escaped Gale, and it wasn't until the color disappeared and then reappeared that the Dragonair was able to control herself.  It was a red light, intermittently flashing through a cracked door, this one with no warning signs at all.  Zap gestured for the other two to stay back and dimmed her Flash, then allowed herself one more apprehensive pause before creeping forward on all fours and peeking in.

"By lightning…" she breathed, her tail springing up to arch over her back in shock.  "No, stay!" she ordered when Kindle took a heavy step forward with half a mind to defend her from whatever was in the room.  "Stay a minute.  I'll call you in."

She slipped through the door and left Kindle standing at Gale's side, feeling the most peculiar need to make small talk in the shadowed hallway of a mad scientist's lab.  Thankfully, Zap's uncharacteristically quiet voice instructing them to enter the ominous red room saved him from that particular ill-advised interaction.  It did directly result in him shouldering his way into the small room and getting an uncomfortably close up view of his own face, however, so he would call it a mixed blessing overall.

The wall opposite the door was comprised of a great hulking computer monitor displaying a dizzying array of information and images, including persistent warnings via text boxes and video footage of the three of them.  The whole screen pulsed red steadily like a heartbeat, the cause of the ominous light that drew them in.  "What in the world is this?" Kindle gasped.

"Cameras, lots of them, and a good security system," Zap replied shortly from where she sat looking distinctly uncomfortable atop a low pile of dark metal tubes.  "We were busted from the moment we landed here."

Gale kept her body coiled tightly and gave off the impression of a spring about to snap even as she navigated the room.  One image drew her attention and made her breath stutter: Mirage and little Enya, outside, oblivious.  Kindle followed her gaze and his heart skipped a beat.  "With such stellar security, why were we not accosted?" the Dragonair asked, swinging around to face Zap like she had something to do with it.

"I'd wager it has something to do with how it looks like an Onix danced a ballet through here."

Zap was exaggerating, as always, but now that she mentioned it Kindle was able to take in more of the room than the arresting images on the monitor.  Machinery lined the other walls, and there were more desks and chairs than strictly necessary for the one-man show Bill's laboratory was.  Nearly all of it, including heavy metal equipment, was upended, like someone rather large had been looking for something rather small and didn't much care how much destruction they caused in the process.  There were scorch marks on the walls and the furniture, but no lingering scent of burning.  Glancing down at the cracked tile below his feet, the Charizard winced and sincerely hoped that none of the papers he had stepped on without noticing were too important.  Perhaps Bill would let it slide this once.  Perhaps Kindle could convince him it was Gale's fault.

As for the Dragonair herself, she had flown up to the ceiling and was investigating a hole blasted in the tiles, which did explain the debris on the floor. It was large enough to fit two Kindles through at once, and he was no small Charizard; whoever made that particular mess was either powerful or large or both ( _or melodramatic_ , Kindle found himself thinking somewhat hysterically).  Zap hadn't moved so much as an ear.

He squinted suspiciously at her.  She was too still, too quiet.  "What are we missing?  I know you want to tell me."

"Then how will you _learn_?"  She rapped her knuckles gingerly against the metal cylinder directly beneath her, flinching only a little at the reverberating clang she created.  Gale hissed and flew higher, which as far as survival instincts go wasn't a bad one.

Kindle tamped down his own desire to fly away and spared two seconds to wish for a Full Heal to help the headache he could feel coming on.  "What are those?"

"Oh, these?" Zap stood and let her Flash build up again, revealing a label on the top canister with tiny print and yet more skulls and crossbones.  "These are just gas tanks filled with some sort of neurotoxin."  Kindle's wings flared involuntarily, and the Raichu leveled an unimpressed look at him before continuing, "Probably not deadly, just enough to knock somebody out given that Bill is unlikely to actually try to murder anyone, but then I'm no chemist."

"Should we be, I don't know, not breathing?  Running away?  At the very least, not sitting on it?"  While Kindle could appreciate Bill's dedication to proper chemical labeling, the recurring skull and crossbones motif was hardly good for a Charizard's heart.

Zap reclined smugly across the metal tubes, though Kindle noticed she remained tense, ready to jump off at a moment's notice.  "That's the other part you missed.  These babies aren't worth anything unless they're hooked up to a dispersal system like the one over there."  Gale hesitantly sank back down from the hole in the ceiling, hovering before the large monitor.  Her shadow cast across the room, leaving Zap's Flash to filter through the shadows like static interwoven with the pulsing red of the alarm.

Kindle reached deep, deep down and managed to locate his remaining stores of optimism.  "So what you're saying is we're safe.  Tell me we're safe."

"Let's put it this way: there's enough evidence of our unwelcome that if we're safe it's not from lack of trying to hurt us."

It was difficult to give the Raichu the human middle finger when his hands only had three clunky claws, but Kindle did his best.   _Optimism gone to waste yet again._ Zap chittered in a scandalized manner and returned the gesture with significantly more dexterity.  "Something's happened to Bill.  We need to find out who did it and figure out what to do."  Smugger than ever, she hopped off of the tanks to stick a landing on the narrow edge of an overturned desk.  "They're probably long gone by now."

"I would not be so sure," Gale hissed, furious and vicious and _loud_ , slicing with a vengeance into the other conversation.  She was a sinuous mass of coils backlit by the computer screen, knotting herself up even as she thrashed loose.  Her tail rapped sharply against one particular window of video feed; it demolished the pixels and left a discolored mark on the screen like a bruise.  "I have found Bill."

From their vantage point on the ground, neither Kindle nor Zap could see the video on which she'd fixated, and the Raichu's Flash fizzled to a distracted halt.  "Alone?"

"He is with the attacker, obviously."

"And we know who it is, don't we."  All of Kindle's optimism stores were plumbed dry.

"We? Speak for yourself.  It's your favorite Dragonite."

" _Tempest."_ For once, Kindle resisted the urge to rage against the team's unending joke about the Pokémon who gave him the scar on his wing.  He settled instead on a nice swearword he had been saving for a special occasion.

* * *

They could say what they would about Bill's obsession with technology ("I think the man's first language was binary," were Enya's exact words when they first met the scientist), but at least all of his software was user-friendly.  Indeed, so much so that three stressed-out Pokémon with minimal exposure to computers could figure out where a certain video feed was coming from after some trial and error.

Okay, a lot of trial and error.  Zap had to be forcibly restrained from shocking the CPU twice, and Gale had no fingers and less skill in describing what she thought Kindle ought to click on next, but when telling this story later all three would somehow leave that part out.

They found Bill tied to a rolling desk chair in the middle of a space that was more clutter than room.  Peering through the gap in a dented metal door left slightly ajar, they were able to make out strange rows of blinking machinery and hissing copper pipes, endless filing cabinets and bookshelves haphazardly stuffed full of similarly endless paperwork and patent certificates; a few bare bulbs illuminated the area with harsh light.  The room was carpeted with a ratty green runner, which was the strangest part to Kindle as it went against the obvious trend of Bill's aesthetic, but it was possible he was focusing on minute details in an effort to keep his cool.  Who could blame him (except Gale because of course she would) – he was hard-pressed not to give in to a little fire rage at the very sight of the massive figure looming over Bill.

To Kindle's memory, the scientist wasn't a little guy; sure, he was rangy, but he was taller than the Charizard himself and had a personality loud enough to fill the entire lab.  To see him now – slumped, unconscious, with that brilliant mind shut off – he seemed unbearably small.  The scientist's protective lab attire hid any injuries on most of his body, but even from a distance one couldn't miss the scalp wound bleeding sluggishly down the side of his face and matting his carefully curated beard.  Kindle's patience for reconnaissance running dangerously thin, he motioned for his companions to stay low and muscled the door open.  He was able to take one impulsive step forward before the Pokémon standing guard took notice.

"Kindle!"  The fearsome Dragonite tittered with delight, dropping the paperweight she had been examining.  She failed to notice a small rodent and a serpent slip into the room behind the Charizard's bulk and ever so gently shut the door behind themselves.

"Tempest," the fire Pokémon in question ground out between clenched teeth.

"Oh my twisters, it's been so long!  I saw a television report that you were living with the wild Charizard on Cinnabar Island!"  Tempest was only average-sized by Dragonite standards, but she still made any room she entered feel cramped, and her hands dwarfed Kindle's when she reached out and grabbed them.  She effortlessly held on as he tried to regain his aloof distance; he wasn't even sure she noticed his attempts.  "How's your wing?  I feel so bad about that still.  I have not miscalculated a Hyper Beam like that in _years_."

"It's fine."  Kindle managed to snatch his hands away and flattened his wings to his back.  A faint snicker reached the Charizard's ear slits only to be willfully ignored.  "Stop bringing it up every time you see me."

Tempest's eyes, large and sad, actually teared up.  "I'm just so sorry," she fretted.

(Low voices whispered to one another under the hiss of leaking steam and the buzz of a light bulb about to blow: "What in lightning?  She has tear ducts?  I thought you guys were reptiles!"

"No, it is weird, but we have them.  I am simply not a feeler of things and so you have not seen me cry.")

Kindle did his level best to ignore his teammates who apparently didn't understand the importance of silence on stealth missions and focused his irritation on the easy target in front of him.  "Hey, since you feel so bad, I've got some questions.  What are you doing here?"

One pearlescent claw gestured vaguely to Bill.  "Master Lance has been devoting his time to some special projects for the Pokémon League ever since he had to cede the Championship," explained Tempest with the air of someone who knows she's been sent into a situation without the full picture but doesn't quite care enough to find out why.  "Since your Enya disappeared," she continued conversationally, crossing her arms and leaning one hip on a tan file cabinet that immediately began to buckle, "the title went back to this touchy young man named Caspian.  The kid's a bit intense for me; wouldn't want to be on his team."

Kindle forced himself to stay relaxed and wrested his flaring tail flame under control.  "Please concentrate.  Why have you kidnapped the nice scientist, Tempest?"

"Official Pokémon League business, apparently."  The shrug was audible in her voice, but she went ahead and did it with her body just to be clear.  The cabinet groaned under the shift of her weight.  "They got me to blast some holes into some walls and overturn a little bit of furniture."  For a seven and a half foot tall dragon-type voted _Most Eager To Battle_ by the Kanto region's premiere tabloid, she didn't really seem too enthusiastic about the whole thing.  "Hey, is it getting kind of dim in here?"

Kindle was ready to rip her antennae out.  "Come on, focus!  You've tied a man to a chair.  A swivel chair.  With computer cables.  What part of that says _official business_ to you?"

"The part where Master Lance asked me to do it!  Besides, Master Lance did all of the tying; I don't have the dexterity for it, you know?"  Tempest straightened and gave a conspiratorial punch to the Charizard's shoulder at a speed that belied her size.  "Of course you know!"

"Stop bonding with me," Kindle rubbed his shoulder and eyed the Dragonite warily, but she was distracted by giving a chuckle at the state of the warped filing cabinet she'd left behind.  "Where is Master Lance, by the way?"

"Oh, he'll be back any minute now, if you want to say hi.  I think he went to make a call.  Signal is terrible down here for some reason!"

Kindle was so tempted to believe that she was messing with him – any member of his team, up to and including the stoic Mirage, absolutely would be doing so by this point – but against his wishes and better judgment he had spent a fair amount of time with her immediately after Enya had won the Championship.  The Dragonite was a genuinely terrible bluffer, and it would take more artifice than she could muster to fake the sincerity of her body language.  He sighed and applied one careful fingertip to his temple.  "That reason would be that Bill is a paranoid man who's not always incorrect in assuming people are out to get him.  And also I'll be rescuing him now before your trainer comes back."

"What?"  A calculating look crossed Tempest's face for the first time.  She brought a hand up to Kindle's chest, bodily blocking his path to her captive.  "Wait, what are you doing here?  It's weird that you'd show up here without a reason.  It's weird, right?"

A quick and powerful wing flap vaulted Kindle over Tempest's shoulder before she could grab at him again.  "Don't worry about it.  Gonna leave now."  He began tearing through the wires holding Bill captive with clumsy fingers, slicing through the cushion in his haste.

"I'm sorry, but I really don't think I can let you do that."  A massive hand clamped onto Kindle's shoulder – the same one that Tempest had punched earlier, in case anyone cared to throw some sympathy his way – and whipped him around, away from Bill.  He slammed into the damaged filing cabinet and it finally collapsed, breaking a pipe that began to vent its steam inches from his face and sent unease trickling down his spine.  The heat didn't bother him, of course, but rather than dissipating as usual the vapor ascended in a winding stream to the ceiling like a twister.  Kindle rolled to his feet and allowed a growl to build in his chest.

"Don't worry, you won't have to _let_ me.  I've been planning on doing it by force this whole time anyway."  Without his notice or intent, his chest began to glow like a coal as he focused on drawing attention to himself, away from the broken pipe.  Zap would do some research later on the Pokédex and learn that this was a display meant to show off how intense a Charizard's inner fire was, usually for the purpose of attracting a mate.  It would take years for the ribbing to die down.  "Non-violence was Plan B."

Tempest's eyes lit up, her sense of self much more secure now that she understood a battle was imminent.  " _Oh_ , okay!  I haven't had a good scuffle in a while; this should be fun!"  She widened her stance in front of Bill and cracked her neck.

"Scuffle may be the wrong word," Kindle warned, distracted from making himself an easy and tempting target by some remaining sense of fair play.

The ceiling gave one rumbling boom and that was all the further warning Tempest got before a complex series of forked lightning bolts struck her down.  She fell to the floor to reveal Zap perched on the arm of Bill's swivel chair, the wires tying him down neatly chewed through and discarded.  Gale descended from within a layer of dark roiling clouds that enveloped the ceiling, electricity still sparking between her and the condensing vapor.

"You call that the element of surprise, Scarizard?  I barely had time to get the steam charged," Zap complained.  Her fur stood up on end and crackled as Gale began to dissipate the storm system above them.

"Well, so _rry_!" Kindle snapped back, nudging her out of the way and hefting Bill up into his arms.  "You try making small talk with your bitterest rival and see how long you last!"  He gestured to Tempest's body and made a questioning noise.

Zap hopped onto the Dragonite's chest, her weight barely making an impression in the scales.  "Small talk?  You insulted her trainer and accused her of kidnapping!  Heartbeat's steady, by the way, she's fine."

"I'll admit the scenario played out differently in my head," Kindle sighed, stepping over the two of them to head for the door.  "I was much sneakier and less outraged.  Gale didn't slap me on the back of the head in that one."

"I have not done so yet."  With the remaining static electricity collected in a halo around her tail, the Dragonair looked like the was considering it just on principle.

Kindle turned to keep a baleful eye on Gale trailing him as he walked, keeping Bill cradled protectively to his chest.  "There's still time."

"Your faith is touching."  She watched, impassive, as in his distraction the Charizard ran his knee directly into a squat black electronic server and disconnected it from the wall.

Zap darted under Kindle as he hopped from one foot to the other and muffled grunts of pain, reaching the door first and pressing her left ear to the cool metal surface.  "Can we please go before our stroke of good luck backfires in some horrible fashion?" she demanded even as she rolled her eyes at the sight of Kindle struggling to hold onto Bill while trying to right the server and rub his knee.  "I think we're okay to make a break for it if -"  She cut herself off, eyes flying open wide in a panic, and flattened her back to the door like her body would really be that much of a deterrent to someone else coming in.  "Too late.  Lightning, I should really learn to keep my mouth shut.  Incoming Lance.  I can't believe he's still wearing those tacky shoes."  Lance was the owner of a pair of equally expensive and unfashionable Arbok-skin boots with steel on the toes which he wore with great pride; they made his footsteps unmistakable.

Kindle realized that he really should have saved his special swearword for this moment, but what was done was done and escaping was more important than regrets.  He scanned the room as if a new way out would simply appear by magic if he searched for one frantically enough, but when that plan fell through he looked up.

"Gale, can you Horn Drill through the roof as an escape route?"

She was up there in a heartbeat, tapping the beige ceiling tile with her horn experimentally.  "Do you know how much _effort_ it takes to collect all of the vapor in a room and turn it into a thunderstorm _in silence_?  All you did was stand there and talk."  A white light began to build at the base of her horn, wrapping around her temples and unfurling in tendrils through the remnants of her storm clouds.

"I got information from her!"  Even Kindle could hear the click-thump of Lance's footfalls approaching the door now.  He abandoned any attempts at subtlety, reared back, and kicked a heavy bookcase in front of the door as Zap made way.

"Oh, yeah!" the Raichu hissed scathingly as she scurried up the shelves to perch at the top with one ear plastered to the crack at the doorframe.  " _Super vague_ information, my favorite!  Shh!"

" _You're_ the one -"

" _Shh!"_

The footsteps stopped right outside the door.  If there was any lingering doubt that they belonged to Lance, it disappeared as soon as his voice – gruff with a heavy lean into the vowels – called out, "Come on, Dragonite!  I told ya to keep the door cracked, now I gotta find the…"  The voice trailed off to be replaced by the sound of crinkling paper.  "Goddamn…cryptic scientists…don't gotta have a different code for every goddamn room."  A sequence of beeps began and Kindle turned a desperate eye to the Dragonair above.

Gale was resplendent, her body a spear of light as she delicately touched the tip of her horn to the ceiling, all laser-sharp focus as she fought to remain in control of her powerful percussive attack.  A tiny wave of force pulsed from that point of contact, pressing a divot into the tile; a small shower of dust wafted downward.  Eyes squeezed shut, she gave another pulse, breaking through the tile into the vent space above.  She grit her teeth and the wild tendrils of light still whipping around her face thrashed, but her next pulse bore her exactingly upward until she could see a pinpoint of daylight, no noise marking her progress but the soft patter of debris to the carpet and the continued electronic beeping at the door.

At this point, Kindle let himself hope that maybe Bill's extreme paranoia and absurdly long door entry codes would save the day, which is probably why several unfortunate things happened at once.

One, Lance made a pleased noise and there was the distinct chunk of a lock disengaging.  The handle jiggled as Lance tried to push the door open – the bookcase with Kindle's full weight pressed against it held, but the Dragon Master had a functioning sense of suspicion and immediately began to bellow for his Dragonite.  She, of course, did not answer.

Two, Gale's Horn Drill sliced through a maze of wires installed just below the outside roof, placed there to deter thieves and saboteurs who might try that as a point of entry.  Once again, Bill's definition of _deter_ differed rather significantly from a lay-person's, in that Bill considered two ounces of plastic explosive per square foot of ceiling to be a reasonable deterrent.

Three, Bill began to stir.

At this point, things began to happen very quickly indeed.  Lance kept shouting for his Dragonite, and by the time he thought to release his two Dragonair to force down the door, Kindle had grabbed Zap by the tail and abandoned his post in front of the bookcase.  The Dragon Master – tacky shoes, excessively styled hair, red and black jumpsuit, full length cape and all – burst into the room at last to see his own prized Dragonite out cold on the floor and the former Pokémon League Champion's iconic Charizard in the middle of the room, looking rather caught out under a conspicuous gaping hole in the ceiling.  A familiar Raichu, tail caught in the Charizard's fist, was sparking furiously and chewing on his knuckles, and a bloodied world-renowned Pokémon researcher was draped, woozily protesting, over his orange shoulder.  Above, the missing Champion's Dragonair plummeted out of the hole in the ceiling and curled into a protective ball even as an uncontrolled wave of light burst from her horn and crumbled every metal object in the room, including the toes of Lance's favorite boots.

He staggered back in pain, mouth agape as with a deafening roar fire erupted from the ceiling.  He waited in agony for heat, for burning, but in front of his panicked eyes the explosion slammed into a shimmering blue barrier which caught the roiling flames and collapsing ceiling wreckage, setting it neatly down along the edges of the room as the inferno lost momentum.  With a quick compression of the barrier, the fire was snuffed out, leaving behind gently smoking objects rendered unrecognizable by a thick layer of soot.  The scent of scorched technology and the acrid sulfur from the explosives were overwhelming.

There was a beat in which no one did anything, caught up in their own heavy breaths and the ringing in their ears, mortal panic still ricocheting through their chests.  The moment was broken by Bill, who slapped an uncoordinated open palm against Kindle's shoulder blade and screeched, "Will you people _stop destroying my lab_?"

In the next moment, Kindle chucked Zap upward to latch onto Gale's coils and slung Bill around into a secure cradle hold; the Dragonair took it as her cue to make her hasty exit through the ruined ceiling, speeding past Mirage who hovered just within the blackened remains of the roof looking enormously pleased with herself.  Kindle got as far as flapping his wings twice to follow before being set upon by Bill's twin Dragonair.

"Come on, guys!  Two on one, seriously?"

"Sorry, dude!" Storm – or maybe it was Squall – said, wrapping himself around his feet.

"Besides, you got two on your side, too.  Get in here, Mirage!" Squall – though it might well have been Storm – said encouragingly.  He swooped around above them, generating a severe downward draft that made Kindle's wings snap flat to his back out of self-preservation.  "Maybe this is the future!  Double battles!"

"Don't be ridiculous," Kindle grunted, trying to keep his grip on Bill tight without accidentally squishing the man; the scientist stared upward with wide, terrified eyes that refused to close against the wind.  "Like that would happen.  Though actually, Mirage, any help?"  A wall of psychic force flickered into being and slammed the flying Dragonair into a sooty wall, pinning him there as he writhed like a Weedle caught in a Pidgeot's beak.  The air immediately stilled.  "Thanks!"

Lance was coaxing a Max Revive down his Dragonite's throat when he became utterly distracted by the entrance of the creature who must have been behind the barrier that saved them all.  She descended from the hole in the ceiling (though truth be told, the ceiling was more hole than not anymore), both hands occupied with directing the blue psychic attack which pinned down one of his own Dragonair.  He recognized instantly the missing Champion's Kadabra, never evolved because the girl couldn't bear to part with her, wearing a ratty backpack and a peculiar sash across her chest.

The Pokémon League was going to have a field day with this: all they needed now was her Gyarados and Aerodactyl and the entire team of missing Pokémon would be accounted for, though the absence of the Champion herself was troubling.  He was going to have to try to capture as much of her team as he could – the Pokémon were all clearly dangerous, even outside of whatever they were doing with Bill, and would be better off in a Pokéball until this whole mess got sorted out.

First things first.  His Dragonite slowly blinked open her eyes, shaking her head in confusion and clearly not getting any useful information from her surroundings, which made sense as the last time she saw this room it did not look nearly as much like a crime scene as it did now.  He tapped her cheek.  "All you need to know is that we need to take in those Pokémon.  The Charizard first, since Dragonair's got his feet already."  Indeed, burdened as he was with a human who occupied his arms and precluded his fire attacks, the poor creature's attempts to free himself were hardly successful against a thirteen foot long serpent wrapped around him up to his stomach.  "Hyper Beam.  Miss the good doctor if you can."

The confusion fled from Tempest; she knew Hyper Beams, even if her track record with this particular Charizard might suggest otherwise.  She could hit him and spare the human even while crouched over and still experiencing phantom spikes of electricity in her chest.  This she could do.  She aimed.

The sling on the Kadabra's chest twitched, and the psychic-type didn't even notice with all of her focus still on Squall.  In fact, the Eevee inside the sling managed to wiggle out of it and land with moderate grace on the carpet before anyone, much less Tempest, registered her presence, and by then it was too late to stop the massive bolt of plasma being loosed from Tempest's jaws, barreling toward her target.  But a child on the field of battle is enough to ruin anyone's careful aim – hopefully Storm would forgive her after he got healed up, but in the meantime he was definitely about to eat a Hyper Beam.  She could only hope it would miss the kit.

Enya, for her part, didn't really have a plan.  She just needed to contribute somehow, and only got so far as thinking maybe she could distract the other Dragonair long enough for Father to escape before she was squirming her way out of the sling.  She landed on all fours – thank you for the jumping lessons, Aunt Zap – and took off running toward Father's attacker across a rough green surface that must have been grass but felt so odd beneath her paws.

She cleared the Dragonair's lowest curves and sank her teeth into his tail tip just in time to flick one ear in the direction of a piercing noise that grew exponentially louder in a split second; harsh yellow light subsumed her vision and an overwhelming force like a herd of Tauros blasted her off her paws.  She tumbled ears over tail and hit a hard surface with a resonant clang.  The Dragonair's long body followed immediately after, made a significantly louder crash, and buried her in his coils.

Kindle had just a moment to be grateful that Tempest sucked so very badly at her job that she'd hit Storm or Squall or whoever had been pinioning him while only grazing his legs.  Then Mirage gasped "Enya!" and Tempest screamed, and his moment turned into horror at the sight of a limp brown and white tail draped between two loops of the downed Dragonair's body.  They were piled up in a charred heap by a crumpled filing cabinet.

The tail twitched.

The tail twitched and then was pulled painstakingly into the heap of unconscious Dragonair scales before Enya was able to get turned around and nudge her little head out into the room, looking bloody and battered and dazed but very much still conscious.  Kindle had time either to have a series of breakdowns about the impossibility of Enya enduring such an attack when it handily took out a full grown Dragonair, or to grab her by the scruff and drop her unceremoniously in Bill's lap as he flew away from the scene.  Though both options were tempting, never let it be said Kindle wasn't pragmatic – he mentally penciled in his breakdown for later that day and took the latter option, collecting Mirage in his wake as he fled after Gale and Zap.  The Dragonair that Mirage had pinned to the wall fell like a length of rope to the floor as she moved out of range and let her force field dissipate.

Lance and his Pokémon were left to sit in the charred remains of Bill's lab with the stunned silence and disbelief of people who weren't quite sure when they had lost the upper hand but definitely did.  The Dragon Master ran shaky hands through his hair before he remember how much product was in it and swore to himself.  Then he tried to stand and swore again, this time to the whole room, as the crushed steel tips of his Arbok-skin boots dug into his feet and reminded him about a few toes that may or may not be broken.  The swearing did not stop as he wrenched the shoes off his feet and flexed his abused toes inside his novelty Dratini socks.  His mom had given those to him for his birthday and now they had blood stains.  Great.

The swearing did peter out as he pulled Pokéballs off of his belt and returned his Dragonair to them.  He levered himself upright with help from Dragonite's shoulder – she blinked up at him before returning to staring into the middle distance.  Then, he began to laugh, hair in disarray and socked feet unsteady on singed green carpet, and kept chuckling as he pulled a thick plastic cell phone from his pocket and dialed a long number from memory.  The laughter cut off immediately when someone picked up, congealing into a borderline hysteric intensity in his voice.

"Arthur, I found what we're looking for!  An actual sighting!"  He peered into the clear blue sky through the broken rafters.  "No, they're long gone…I would have, obviously, but I didn't have the chance…Bill's lab has taken some property damage, by the way – I'll make sure his insurance company only finds evidence of self-sabotage.  There may or may not have been a Hyper Beam in here, but that was only after Bill's own goddamn ceiling exploded, and that's on him."  His feet shuffled like they wanted to pace, and his free hand returned to his hair to mindlessly snarl in clumps of red spikes.

"Listen, Lyle's team was _here_ , I saw almost all of them, and they just took Bill, all right?  We need to track them.  The doctor's still got information I want, but the mission has new parameters with this sighting.  This is the closest we've even gotten!  I know it's dangerous."  He gingerly slung a leg over Dragonite's back, careful of his toes and a new electricity burn between her shoulders, and directed her attention to the open sky.  Her wings flared obediently.  "Hmm?  Oh, an Eevee.  Yes, seriously!"

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is based loosely off of the original RBY games and is therefore set in the Kanto region, back in the day when that was the only region out there. (However, I have taken the liberty of creating new towns/cities because, hey, there’s no way that there are only twelve places in the entire region to go.) This also means that if you happen to read any of my OC’s past experiences and they sound like they were ripped off from the games…well, that’s because I ripped them off from the games.
> 
> A note about levels: I’ve always kind of thought that Pokémon levels had to be able to be measured quantitatively – perhaps a chemical, like the midi-chlorian in Jedis, that could be detected in the blood or sensed by a Pokédex. In my mind, each species of Pokémon had a universal concentration of this chemical for each “level,” and the as the Pokémon grew stronger that concentration increased to the next "level;" that way, true comparisons could be made. (Yes, this is the sort of thing I thought very deeply about as a child.)
> 
> All quotes at the beginning of each chapter are by Brian Andreas of the StoryPeople fame.
> 
> Teen rating is for the occasional potty word.
> 
> Disclaimer: I don’t own Pokémon.


End file.
